A Kepler-űrmisszió

2009. március 7-én indult útjára a NASA Kepler-űrtávcsöve, melynek elsődleges célja a lakhatósági zónában keringő, Földhöz hasonló exobolygók kimutatása fotometriai (tranzit) módszerrel. A program lényeges eleme a csillagok szeizmológiai vizsgálata, melybe Intézetünk is bekapcsolódott. A tudományos célkitűzések és az első eredmények mellett a misszió előkészítésében és földi támogatásában végzett magyar hozzájárulást is bemutatjuk

Variable stars with the Kepler space telescope

The Kepler space telescope has revolutionised our knowledge about exoplanets and stars and is continuing to do so in the K2 mission. The exquisite photometric precision, together with the long, uninterrupted observations opened up a new way to investigate the structure and evolution of stars. Asteroseismology, the study of stellar oscillations, allowed us to investigate solar-like stars and to peer into the insides of red giants and massive stars. But many discoveries have been made about classical variable stars too, ranging from pulsators like Cepheids and RR Lyraes to eclipsing binary stars and cataclysmic variables, and even supernovae. In this review, which is far from an exhaustive summary of all results obtained with Kepler, we collected some of the most interesting discoveries, and ponder on the role for amateur observers in this golden era of stellar astrophysics.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, published in the Journal of the AAVSO: https://www.aavso.org/apps/jaavso/article/3235/, v2: fixed a bad a reference. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1108.3083 by other author

The effects of health tourism investments in tourism businesses in the Northern Hungarian Region

In my article I would like to find answers for the question how frequently and effectively the region’s business leaders in Northern Hungary participated in various development programs, as regards investments in health tourism, what developments have been made mainly in the area, what the positive effects of these developments were in the life of businesses, whether the businesses (leaders) feel successful, and how their success was manifested. I carried out a questionnaire survey among enterprises. From the data I calculated mean, SD and spectrum and examined the crosstab correlations as well, and the Cramer’s V associate coefficient and Contingency coefficient. The results of the correlation tests could be summarised as the following: According to the survey, the number of the medium-sized enterprises being involved utilised a significant proportion of their development funds, compared to the micro and small enterprises. Although the idea of spas winterizing their pools was not considered an important development, both the adventure and wellness elements were important for the construction of thermal baths. In the case of hotels, the expansion of wellness elements and other additional services together with the development of marketing activities played an important role. Besides the positive business publicity, enterprises see the positive effects of the investment in the increase of their income; the success can be the result of the adequate supply of components, the professional management and that of positive image

Shockwave Behaviour in RR Lyrae Stars

Here we present the detailed analysis of some modulated Kepler and K2 RR Lyrae stars that show peculiar bump progression in respect to the pulsation phase.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, to be published in the proceedings of "The RR Lyrae 2017 Conference", Niepolomice, Poland, 17-21 September 201

A Publish-Subscribe Scheme Based Open Architecture for Crowd-Sourcing

Participatory sensing, when a crowd of users collaborate to collect useful information, based applications are getting popular these days thanks to the proliferation of powerful mobile devices. The built-in sensors of smartphones offer an easy and handy way to monitor the environment and collect data which can serve as the basis of smart applications. However, the quick and flexible development and deployment of these applications call for a unifying open architecture. In this paper we propose a publish-subscribe based open participatory sensing architecture

Publish/Subscribe Communication for Crowd-sourcing Based Smart City Applications

Collecting data and monitoring our environment give the basis for smart city applications which are getting popular today. However, the traditional approach to deploy a sensing and monitoring infrastructure is usually expensive and not always practical. Mobile crowd-sourcing can open new ways for data collection and smart city services. In this case, mobile devices with their built-in sensors and their owners are used to monitor the environment. For instance, the timetable of a smart travel planner service can be updated in real-time based on the continuously monitored time gap by passengers between consecutive buses on a public transportation route. This requires a common communication model facilitating crowd-sourced data collection. In this paper, we overview the design considerations of crowd-sourcing based smart city applications, propose data collection via using the publish/subscribe communication model and investigate the possible use of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for such applications

Are RRab stars fully radial?

Thanks to the space missions CoRoT and Kepler new oscillation frequencies have been discovered in the Fourier spectra of Blazhko RR Lyrae stars. The period doubling (PD) yields half-integer frequencies between the fundamental mode and its harmonics. In many cases the first and/or second radial overtone frequencies also appear temporally. Some stars show extra frequencies that were identified as potential non-radial modes. We show here that all these frequencies can be explained by pure radial pulsation as linear combinations of the frequencies of radial fundamental and overtone modes.Comment: 2 pages. To appear in proceedings of IAU Symp. 301, Precision Asteroseismology, August 2013, Wroclaw, Polan