The Color Distributions of Globular Clusters in Virgo Elliptical Galaxies

This Letter presents the color distributions of the globular cluster (GC) systems of 12 Virgo elliptical galaxies, measured using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Bright galaxies with large numbers of detected GC's show two distinct cluster populations with mean V-I colors near 1.01 and 1.26. The GC population of M86 is a clear exception; its color distribution shows a single sharp peak near V-I=1.03. The absence of the red population in this galaxy, and the consistency of the peak colors in the others, may be indications of the origins of the two populations found in most bright elliptical galaxies.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, to be published in ApJ Letters Corrections to introductio

The SDSS data archive server

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Archive Server (DAS) provides public access to data files produced by the SDSS data reduction pipeline. This article discusses challenges in public distribution of data of this volume and complexity, and how the project addressed them. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)1 is an astronomical survey of covering roughly one quarter of the night sky. It contains images of this area, a catalog of almost 300 million objects detected in those images, and spectra of more than a million of these objects. The catalog of objects includes a variety of data on each object. These data include not only basic information but also fit parameters for a variety of models, classifications by sophisticated object classification algorithms, statistical parameters, and more. If the survey contains the spectrum of an object, the catalog includes a variety of other parameters derived from its spectrum. Data processing and catalog generation, described more completely in the SDSS Early Data Release2 paper, consists of several stages: collection of imaging data, processing of imaging data, selection of spectroscopic targets from catalogs generated from the imaging data, collection of spectroscopic data, processing of spectroscopic data, and loading of processed data into a database. Each of these stages is itself a complex process. For example, the software that processes the imaging data determines and removes some instrumental signatures in the raw images to create 'corrected frames', models the point spread function, models and removes the sky background, detects objects, measures object positions, measures the radial profile and other morphological parameters for each object, measures the brightness of each object using a variety of methods, classifies the objects, calibrates the brightness measurements against survey standards, and produces a variety of quality assurance plots and diagnostic tables. The complexity of the spectroscopic data reduction pipeline is similar. Each pipeline deposits the results in a collection of files on disk. The Catalog Archive Server (CAS) provides an interface to a database of objects detected through the SDSS along with their properties and observational metadata. This serves the needs of most users, but some users require access to files produced by the pipelines. Some data, including the corrected frames (the pixel data itself corrected for instrumental signatures), the models for the point spread function, and an assortment of quality assurance plots, are not included in the database at all. Sometimes it is simply more convenient for a user to read data from existing files than to retrieve it using database queries. This is often the case, for example, when a user wants to download data a significant fraction of objects in the database. Users might need to perform analysis that requires more computing power than the CAS database servers can reasonably provide, and so need to download the data so that it can be analyzed with local resources. Users can derive observational parameters not measured by the standard SDSS pipeline from the corrected frames, metadata, and other data products, or simply use the output of tools with which they're familiar. The challenge in distributing these data is lies not in the distribution method itself, but in providing tools and support that allow users to find the data they need and interpret it properly. After introducing the data itself, this article describes how the DAS uses ubiquitous and well understood technologies to manage and distribute the data. It then discusses how it addresses the more difficult problem of helping the public find and use the data it contains, despite its complexity of its content and organization

Running the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data archive server

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Archive Server (DAS) provides public access to over 12Tb of data in 17 million files produced by the SDSS data reduction pipeline. Many tasks which seem trivial when serving smaller, less complex data sets present challenges when serving data of this volume and technical complexity. The included output files should be chosen to support as much science as possible from publicly released data, and only publicly released data. Users must have the resources needed to read and interpret the data correctly. Server administrators must generate new data releases at regular intervals, monitor usage, quickly recover from hardware failures, and monitor the data served by the DAS both for contents and corruption. We discuss these challenges, describe tools we use to administer and support the DAS, and discuss future development plans

The Surface Brightness Fluctuations and Globular Cluster Populations of M87 and its Companions

Using the surface brightness fluctuations in HST WFPC-2 images, we determine that M87, NGC 4486B, and NGC 4478 are all at a distance of ~16 Mpc, while NGC 4476 lies in the background at ~21 Mpc. We also examine the globular clusters of M87 using archived HST fields. We detect the bimodal color distribution, and find that the amplitude of the red peak relative to the blue peak is greatest near the center. This feature is in good agreement with the merger model of elliptical galaxy formation, where some of the clusters originated in progenitor galaxies while other formed during mergers.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Relativistic MHD with Adaptive Mesh Refinement

This paper presents a new computer code to solve the general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) equations using distributed parallel adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). The fluid equations are solved using a finite difference Convex ENO method (CENO) in 3+1 dimensions, and the AMR is Berger-Oliger. Hyperbolic divergence cleaning is used to control the $\nabla\cdot {\bf B}=0$ constraint. We present results from three flat space tests, and examine the accretion of a fluid onto a Schwarzschild black hole, reproducing the Michel solution. The AMR simulations substantially improve performance while reproducing the resolution equivalent unigrid simulation results. Finally, we discuss strong scaling results for parallel unigrid and AMR runs.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures, 3 table

Discovery of New Ultracool White Dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We report the discovery of five very cool white dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Four are ultracool, exhibiting strong collision induced absorption (CIA) from molecular hydrogen and are similar in color to the three previously known coolest white dwarfs, SDSS J1337+00, LHS 3250 and LHS 1402. The fifth, an ultracool white dwarf candidate, shows milder CIA flux suppression and has a color and spectral shape similar to WD 0346+246. All five new white dwarfs are faint (g > 18.9) and have significant proper motions. One of the new ultracool white dwarfs, SDSS J0947, appears to be in a binary system with a slightly warmer (T_{eff} ~ 5000K) white dwarf companion.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ApJL. Higher resolution versions of finding charts are available at http://astro.uchicago.edu/~gates/findingchart

A Survey of Open Clusters in the u'g'r'i'z' Filter System: I. Results for NGC2548 (M48)

We present initial results of a photometric survey of open star clusters, primarily in the southern hemisphere, taken in the u'g'r'i'z' filter system. While our entire observed sample covers more than 100 clusters, here we present data for NGC2548 (M48) which is a cluster characterized in the UBV and DDO photometric systems. We compare our results to the published values from other observers and to the Padova theoretical isochrones and metallicity curves. These observations demonstrate that the u'g'r'i'z' filters can play an important role in determining the metallicity of stars and clusters. We begin this series of papers with a study of NGC2548 because we have obtained data of this cluster not only with our main program telescope, the CTIO Curtis-Schmidt, but also with the US Naval Observatory (USNO) 1.0m telescope (the telescope used to define the u'g'r'i'z' system), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) 0.5m Photometric Telescope (the photometric monitoring telescope used to calibrate the SDSS 2.5m telescope imaging data). We have used the data from this study to validate our ability to transform measurements obtained on other telescopes to the standard USNO 1.0m u'g'r'i'z' system. This validation is particularly important for very red stars, for which the original u'g'r'i'z' standard star network is poorly constrained.Comment: 32 pages, 8 figures. Complete, machine-readable versions of Tables 4-6 available at http://home.fnal.gov/~dtucker/OpenClusters/NGC2548/ . Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa

A Catalog of Spectroscopically Confirmed White Dwarfs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 4

We present a catalog of 9316 spectroscopically confirmed white dwarfs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 4. We have selected the stars through photometric cuts and spectroscopic modeling, backed up by a set of visual inspections. Roughly 6000 of the stars are new discoveries, roughly doubling the number of spectroscopically confirmed white dwarfs. We analyze the stars by performing temperature and surface gravity fits to grids of pure hydrogen and helium atmospheres. Among the rare outliers are a set of presumed helium-core DA white dwarfs with estimated masses below 0.3 Msun, including two candidates that may be the lowest masses yet found. We also present a list of 928 hot subdwarfs.Comment: Accepted by the Astrophysical Journal Supplements, 25 pages, 24 figures, LaTeX. The electronic catalog, as well as diagnostic figures and links to the spectra, is available at http://das.sdss.org/wdcat/dr4

Hdelta-Selected Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey I: The Catalog

[Abridged] We present here a new and homogeneous sample of 3340 galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) based solely on the observed strength of their Hdelta absorption line. These galaxies are commonly known as ``post-starburst'' or ``E+A'' galaxies, and the study of these galaxies has been severely hampered by the lack of a large, statistical sample of such galaxies. In this paper, we rectify this problem by selecting a sample of galaxies which possess an absorption Hdelta equivalent width of EW(Hdelta_max) - Delta EW(Hdelta_max) > 4A from 106682 galaxies in the SDSS. We have performed extensive tests on our catalog including comparing different methodologies of measuring the Hdelta absorption and studying the effects of stellar absorption, dust extinction, emission-filling and measurement error. The measured abundance of our Hdelta-selected (HDS) galaxies is 2.6 +/- 0.1% of all galaxies within a volume-limited sample of 0.05<z<0.1 and M(r*)<-20.5, which is consistent with previous studies of such galaxies in the literature. We find that only 25 of our HDS galaxies in this volume-limited sample (3.5+/-0.7%) show no evidence for OII and Halpha emission, thus indicating that true E+A (or k+a) galaxies are extremely rare objects at low redshift, i.e., only 0.09+/-0.02% of all galaxies in this volume-limited sample are true E+A galaxies. In contrast, 89+/-5% of our HDS galaxies in the volume-limited sample have significant detections of the OII and Halpha emission lines. We find 27 galaxies in our volume-limited HDS sample that possess no detectable OII emission, but do however possess detectable Halpha emission. These galaxies may be dusty star-forming galaxies. We provide the community with this new catalog of Hdelta-selected galaxies to aid in the understanding of these galaxies.Comment: Submitted to PASJ. Catalog of galaxies available at http://astrophysics.phys.cmu.edu/~tomo/ea