Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of the Outburst Site of M31 RV

M31 RV is a luminous red variable star that appeared for several months in the bulge of M31 during 1988. Unlike classical novae, M31 RV was cool throughout its outburst. Interest in this object has revived recently because of its strong resemblance to V838 Mon, a luminous Galactic variable star that appeared in 2002 and is illuminating a spectacular light echo, and has evolved to ever-cooler surface temperatures. V4332 Sgr is a third object which was also a red supergiant throughout its eruption. We have examined archival Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of the site of M31 RV, obtained fortuitously in 1999 with the WFPC2 camera in parallel mode during spectroscopic observations of the nucleus of M31. We located the site of M31 RV in the HST frames precisely through astrometric registration with ground-based CCD images, including several taken during the outburst. No light echo is seen at the M31 RV site, implying that M31 RV is not surrounded by circumstellar (or interstellar) dust similar to that around V838 Mon, or that its extent is less than ~1.7 pc. The stellar population at the outburst site consists purely of old red giants; there is no young population, such as seen around V838 Mon. There are no stars of unusual color at the site, suggesting that M31 RV had faded below HST detectability in the 11 years since outburst, that it is an unresolved companion of one of the red giants in the field, or that it is one of the red giants. We suggest future observations that may help decide among these possibilities.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables; AJ accepte

Hadronic Regge Trajectories: Problems and Approaches

We scrutinized hadronic Regge trajectories in a framework of two different models --- string and potential. Our results are compared with broad spectrum of existing theoretical quark models and all experimental data from PDG98. It was recognized that Regge trajectories for mesons and baryons are not straight and parallel lines in general in the current resonance region both experimentally and theoretically, but very often have appreciable curvature, which is flavor-dependent. For a set of baryon Regge trajectories this fact is well described in the considered potential model. The standard string models predict linear trajectories at high angular momenta J with some form of nonlinearity at low J.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, LaTe

Variability of Active Galactic Nuclei from the Optical to X-ray Regions

Some progress in understanding AGN variability is reviewed. Reprocessing of X-ray radiation to produce significant amounts of longer-wavelength continua seems to be ruled out. In some objects where there has been correlated X-ray and optical variability, the amplitude of the optical variability has exceeded the amplitude of X-ray variability. We suggest that accelerated particles striking material could be linking X-ray and optical variability (as in activity in the solar chromosphere). Beaming effects could be significant in all types of AGN. The diversity in optical/X-ray relationships at different times in the same object, and between different objects, might be explained by changes in geometry and directions of motion relative to our line of sight. Linear shot-noise models of the variability are ruled out; instead there must be large-scale organization of variability. Variability occurs on light-crossing timescales rather than viscous timescales and this probably rules out the standard Shakura-Sunyaev accretion disk. Radio-loud and radio-quiet AGNs have similar continuum shapes and similar variability properties. This suggests similar continuum origins and variability mechanisms. Despite their extreme X-ray variability, narrow-line Seyfert 1s (NLS1s) do not show extreme optical variability.Comment: Invited talk given at Euro Asian Astronomical Society meeting in Moscow, June 2002. 20 pages, 4 figures. References update

Transient Gamma Ray Spectrometer Measurements of Gamma-Ray Lines from Novae. II. Constraining the Galactic Nova Rate from a Survey of the Southern Sky during 1995-1997

The good energy resolution (3--4 keV FWHM) of the Transient Gamma Ray Spectrometer (TGRS) on board the WIND spacecraft makes it sensitive to Doppler-shifted outbursts of 511 keV electron-positron annihilation radiation, the reason being that the Doppler shift causes the cosmic line to be slightly offset from a strong instrumental background 511 keV line at rest, which is ubiquitous in space environments. Such a cosmic line (blueshifted) is predicted to arise in classical novae due to the annihilation of positrons from $\beta$-decay on a timescale of a few hours in an expanding envelope. A further advantage of TGRS - its broad field of view, containing the entire southern ecliptic hemisphere - has enabled us to make a virtually complete and unbiased 3-year search for classical novae at distances up to ~1 kpc. We present negative results of this search, and estimate its implications for the highly-uncertain Galactic classical nova rate and for future space missions.Comment: 22 pp. + 3 fig

Three-body correlations in direct reactions: Example of 6^{6}Be populated in (p,n)(p,n) reaction

The $^{6}$Be continuum states were populated in the charge-exchange reaction $^1$H($^{6}$Li,$^{6}$Be)$n$ collecting very high statistics data ($\sim 5 \times 10^6$ events) on the three-body $\alpha$+$p$+$p$ correlations. The $^{6}$Be excitation energy region below $\sim 3$ MeV is considered, where the data are dominated by contributions from the $0^+$ and $2^+$ states. It is demonstrated how the high-statistics few-body correlation data can be used to extract detailed information on the reaction mechanism. Such a derivation is based on the fact that highly spin-aligned states are typically populated in the direct reactions.Comment: submitted to Physical Review