Do Water Fountain Jets Really Indicate the Onset of the Morphological Metamorphosis of Circumstellar Envelopes?

The small-scale bipolar jets having short dynamical ages from "water fountain (WF)" sources are regarded as an indication of the onset of circumstellar envelope morphological metamorphosis of intermediate-mass stars. Such process usually happens at the end of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase. However, recent studies found that WFs could be AGB stars or even early planetary nebulae. This fact prompted the idea that WFs may not necessarily be objects at the beginning of the morphological transition process. In the present work, we show that WFs could have different envelope morphologies by studying their spectral energy distribution profiles. Some WFs have spherical envelopes that resembles usual AGB stars, while others have aspherical envelopes which are more common to post-AGB stars. The results imply that WFs may not represent the earliest stage of the morphological metamorphosis. We further argue that the dynamical age of a WF jet, which can be calculated from maser proper motions, may not be the real age of the jet. The dynamical age cannot be used to justify the moment when the envelope begins to become aspherical, nor to tell the concrete evolutionary status of the object. A WF jet could be the innermost part of a larger well-developed jet, which is not necessarily a young jet.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Near-infrared polarimetric study of the bipolar nebula IRAS 19312+1950

We obtained H-band polarimetric data of IRAS 19312+1950 using the near-infrared camera (CIAO) on the 8 m Subaru telescope. In order to investigate the physical properties of the central star and the nebula, we performed dust radiative transfer modeling and compared the model results with the observed spectral energy distributions (SEDs), the radial profiles of the total intensity image, and the fraction of linear polarization map. The total intensity image shows a nearly spherical core with ~3" radius, an S-shaped arm extending ~10" in the northwest to southeast direction, and an extended lobe towards the southwest. The polarization map shows a centro-symmetric vector alignment in almost the entire nebula and low polarizations along the S-shaped arm. These results suggest that the nebula is accompanied by a central star, and the S-shaped arm has a physically ring-like structure. From our radiative transfer modeling, we estimated the stellar temperature, the bolometric luminosity, and the current mass-loss rate to be 2800 K, 7000 L_sun, and 5.3x10^{-6} M_sun yr^{-1}, respectively. Taking into account previous observational results, such as the detection of SiO maser emissions and silicate absorption feature in the 10 $\mu$m spectrum, our dust radiative transfer analysis based on our NIR imaging polarimetry suggests that (1) the central star of IRAS 19312+1950 is likely to be an oxygen-rich, dust-enshrouded AGB star and (2) most of the circumstellar material originates from other sources (e.g. ambient dark clouds) rather than as a result of mass loss from the central star.Comment: 8 pages with 4 figure

SiO and H2O Maser Observations of Red Supergiants in Star Clusters Embedded in the Galactic Disk

We present the result of radio observations of red supergiants in the star cluster, Stephenson's #2, and candidates for red supergiants in the star clusters, Mercer et al. (2005)'s #4, #8, and #13, in the SiO and H$_2$O maser lines.The Stephenson's #2 cluster and nearby aggregation at the South-West contain more than 15 red supergiants. We detected one at the center of Stephenson's #2 and three in the south-west aggregation in the SiO maser line, and three of these 4 were also detected in the H2O maser line. The average radial velocity of the 4 detected objects is 96 km s^{-1}, giving a kinematic distance of 5.5 kpc, which locates this cluster near the base of the Scutum-Crux spiral arm. We also detected 6 SiO emitting objects associated with the other star clusters. In addition, mapping observations in the CO J=1--0 line toward these clusters revealed that an appreciable amount of molecular gas still remains around Stephenson's #2 cluster in contrast to the prototypical red-supergiant cluster, Bica et al.'s #122. It indicates that a time scale of gas expulsion differs considerably in individual clusters.Comment: high res. figures available at http://www.nro.nao.ac.jp/~lib_pub/report/data/no674.pdf. PASJ 62, No.2 (2010, April 25 issue) in pres

Rigid microenvironments promote cardiac differentiation of mouse and human embryonic stem cells.

While adult heart muscle is the least regenerative of tissues, embryonic cardiomyocytes are proliferative, with embryonic stem (ES) cells providing an endless reservoir. In addition to secreted factors and cell-cell interactions, the extracellular microenvironment has been shown to play an important role in stem cell lineage specification, and understanding how scaffold elasticity influences cardiac differentiation is crucial to cardiac tissue engineering. Though previous studies have analyzed the role of the matrix elasticity on the function of differentiated cardiomyocytes, whether it affects the induction of cardiomyocytes from pluripotent stem cells is poorly understood. Here, we examined the role of matrix rigidity on the cardiac differentiation using mouse and human ES cells. Culture on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrates of varied monomer-to-crosslinker ratios revealed that rigid extracellular matrices promote a higher yield of de novo cardiomyocytes from undifferentiated ES cells. Using an genetically modified ES system that allows us to purify differentiated cardiomyocytes by drug selection, we demonstrate that rigid environments induce higher cardiac troponin T expression, beating rate of foci, and expression ratio of adult α- to fetal β- myosin heavy chain in a purified cardiac population. M-mode and mechanical interferometry image analyses demonstrate that these ES-derived cardiomyocytes display functional maturity and synchronization of beating when co-cultured with neonatal cardiomyocytes harvested from a developing embryo. Together, these data identify matrix stiffness as an independent factor that instructs not only the maturation of the already differentiated cardiomyocytes but also the induction and proliferation of cardiomyocytes from undifferentiated progenitors. Manipulation of the stiffness will help direct the production of functional cardiomyocytes en masse from stem cells for regenerative medicine purposes