252 research outputs found
Gaia: Organisation and challenges for the data processing
Gaia is an ambitious space astrometry mission of ESA with a main objective to
map the sky in astrometry and photometry down to a magnitude 20 by the end of
the next decade. While the mission is built and operated by ESA and an
industrial consortium, the data processing is entrusted to a consortium formed
by the scientific community, which was formed in 2006 and formally selected by
ESA one year later. The satellite will downlink around 100 TB of raw telemetry
data over a mission duration of 5 years from which a very complex iterative
processing will lead to the final science output: astrometry with a final
accuracy of a few tens of microarcseconds, epoch photometry in wide and narrow
bands, radial velocity and spectra for the stars brighter than 17 mag. We
discuss the general principles and main difficulties of this very large data
processing and present the organisation of the European Consortium responsible
for its design and implementation.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of IAU Symp. 24
Density-PDFs and Lagrangian Statistics of highly compressible Turbulence
We report on probability-density-functions (PDF) of the mass density in
numerical simulations of highly compressible hydrodynamic flows and the
corresponding structure formation of Lagrangian particles advected by the
flows. Numerical simulations were performed with collocation points and
2 million tracer particles integrated over several dynamical times. We propose
a connection between the PDF of the Lagrangian tracer particles and the
predicted log-normal distribution of the density fluctuations in isothermal
systems
Gravitational Collapse in Turbulent Molecular Clouds. I. Gasdynamical Turbulence
Observed molecular clouds often appear to have very low star formation
efficiencies and lifetimes an order of magnitude longer than their free-fall
times. Their support is attributed to the random supersonic motions observed in
them. We study the support of molecular clouds against gravitational collapse
by supersonic, gas dynamical turbulence using direct numerical simulation.
Computations with two different algorithms are compared: a particle-based,
Lagrangian method (SPH), and a grid-based, Eulerian, second-order method
(ZEUS). The effects of both algorithm and resolution can be studied with this
method. We find that, under typical molecular cloud conditions, global collapse
can indeed be prevented, but density enhancements caused by strong shocks
nevertheless become gravitationally unstable and collapse into dense cores and,
presumably, stars. The occurance and efficiency of local collapse decreases as
the driving wave length decreases and the driving strength increases. It
appears that local collapse can only be prevented entirely with unrealistically
short wave length driving, but observed core formation rates can be reproduced
with more realistic driving. At high collapse rates, cores are formed on short
time scales in coherent structures with high efficiency, while at low collapse
rates they are scattered randomly throughout the region and exhibit
considerable age spread. We suggest that this naturally explains the observed
distinction between isolated and clustered star formation.Comment: Minor revisions in response to referee, thirteen figures, accepted to
Astrophys.
Direct path from microscopic mechanics to Debye shielding, Landau damping, and wave-particle interaction
The derivation of Debye shielding and Landau damping from the -body
description of plasmas is performed directly by using Newton's second law for
the -body system. This is done in a few steps with elementary calculations
using standard tools of calculus, and no probabilistic setting. Unexpectedly,
Debye shielding is encountered together with Landau damping. This approach is
shown to be justified in the one-dimensional case when the number of particles
in a Debye sphere becomes large. The theory is extended to accommodate a
correct description of trapping and chaos due to Langmuir waves. Shielding and
collisional transport are found to be two related aspects of the repulsive
deflections of electrons, in such a way that each particle is shielded by all
other ones while keeping in uninterrupted motion.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1310.3096,
arXiv:1210.154
The Statistics of Supersonic Isothermal Turbulence
We present results of large-scale three-dimensional simulations of supersonic
Euler turbulence with the piecewise parabolic method and multiple grid
resolutions up to 2048^3 points. Our numerical experiments describe
non-magnetized driven turbulent flows with an isothermal equation of state and
an rms Mach number of 6. We discuss numerical resolution issues and demonstrate
convergence, in a statistical sense, of the inertial range dynamics in
simulations on grids larger than 512^3 points. The simulations allowed us to
measure the absolute velocity scaling exponents for the first time. The
inertial range velocity scaling in this strongly compressible regime deviates
substantially from the incompressible Kolmogorov laws. The slope of the
velocity power spectrum, for instance, is -1.95 compared to -5/3 in the
incompressible case. The exponent of the third-order velocity structure
function is 1.28, while in incompressible turbulence it is known to be unity.
We propose a natural extension of Kolmogorov's phenomenology that takes into
account compressibility by mixing the velocity and density statistics and
preserves the Kolmogorov scaling of the power spectrum and structure functions
of the density-weighted velocity v=\rho^{1/3}u. The low-order statistics of v
appear to be invariant with respect to changes in the Mach number. For
instance, at Mach 6 the slope of the power spectrum of v is -1.69, and the
exponent of the third-order structure function of v is unity. We also directly
measure the mass dimension of the "fractal" density distribution in the
inertial subrange, D_m = 2.4, which is similar to the observed fractal
dimension of molecular clouds and agrees well with the cascade phenomenology.Comment: 15 pages, 19 figures, ApJ v665, n2, 200
Statistics of Dissipation and Enstrophy Induced by a Set of Burgers Vortices
Dissipation and enstropy statistics are calculated for an ensemble of
modified Burgers vortices in equilibrium under uniform straining. Different
best-fit, finite-range scaling exponents are found for locally-averaged
dissipation and enstrophy, in agreement with existing numerical simulations and
experiments. However, the ratios of dissipation and enstropy moments supported
by axisymmetric vortices of any profile are finite. Therefore the asymptotic
scaling exponents for dissipation and enstrophy induced by such vortices are
equal in the limit of infinite Reynolds number.Comment: Revtex (4 pages) with 4 postscript figures included via psfi
Turbulent Control of the Star Formation Efficiency
Supersonic turbulence plays a dual role in molecular clouds: On one hand, it
contributes to the global support of the clouds, while on the other it promotes
the formation of small-scale density fluctuations, identifiable with clumps and
cores. Within these, the local Jeans length \Ljc is reduced, and collapse
ensues if \Ljc becomes smaller than the clump size and the magnetic support
is insufficient (i.e., the core is ``magnetically supercritical''); otherwise,
the clumps do not collapse and are expected to re-expand and disperse on a few
free-fall times. This case may correspond to a fraction of the observed
starless cores. The star formation efficiency (SFE, the fraction of the cloud's
mass that ends up in collapsed objects) is smaller than unity because the mass
contained in collapsing clumps is smaller than the total cloud mass. However,
in non-magnetic numerical simulations with realistic Mach numbers and
turbulence driving scales, the SFE is still larger than observational
estimates. The presence of a magnetic field, even if magnetically
supercritical, appears to further reduce the SFE, but by reducing the
probability of core formation rather than by delaying the collapse of
individual cores, as was formerly thought. Precise quantification of these
effects as a function of global cloud parameters is still needed.Comment: Invited review for the conference "IMF@50: the Initial Mass Function
50 Years Later", to be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, eds. E.
Corbelli, F. Palla, and H. Zinnecke
Is nasal carriage of the main acquisition pathway for surgical-site infection in orthopaedic surgery?
International audienceThe endogenous or exogenous origin of , responsible for orthopaedic surgical-site infections (SSI), remains debated. We conducted a multicentre prospective cohort study to analyse the respective part of exogenous contamination and endogenous self-inoculation by during elective orthopaedic surgery. The nose of each consecutive patient was sampled before surgery. Strains of isolated from the nose and the wound, in the case of SSI, were compared by antibiotypes or pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). A total of 3,908 consecutive patients undergoing orthopaedic surgery were included. Seventy-seven patients developed an SSI (2%), including 22 related to (0.6%). was isolated from the nose of 790 patients (20.2%) at the time of surgery. In the multivariate analysis, nasal carriage was found to be a risk factor for SSI in orthopaedic surgery. However, only nine subjects exhibiting SSI had been found to be carriers before surgery: when compared, three pairs of strains were considered to be different and six similar. In most cases of SSI, either an endogenous origin could not be demonstrated or pre-operative nasal colonisation retrieved a strain that was different from the one recovered from the surgical sit
A Super-Alfvenic Model of Dark Clouds
Supersonic random motions are observed in dark clouds and are traditionally
interpreted as Alfven waves, but the possibility that these motions are
super-Alfvenic has not been ruled out. In this work we report the results of
numerical experiments in two opposite regimes; M_a ~ 1 and M_a >> 1, where M_a
is the initial Alfvenic Mach number --the ratio of the rms velocity to the
Alfven speed. Our results show that models with M_a >> 1 are consistent with
the observed properties of molecular clouds that we have tested --statistics of
extinction measurements, Zeeman splitting measurements of magnetic field
strength, line width versus integrated antenna temperature of molecular
emission line spectra, statistical B-n relation, and scatter in that relation--
while models with M_a ~ 1 have properties that are in conflict with the
observations. We find that both the density and the magnetic field in molecular
clouds may be very intermittent. The statistical distributions of magnetic
field and gas density are related by a power law, with an index that decreases
with time in experiments with decaying turbulence. After about one dynamical
time it stabilizes at B ~ n^{0.4}. Magnetically dominated cores form early in
the evolution, while later on the intermittency in the density field wins out,
and also cores with weak field can be generated, by mass accretion along
magnetic field lines.Comment: 10 figures, 2 tables include
Nonlinear theory of mirror instability near threshold
An asymptotic model based on a reductive perturbative expansion of the drift
kinetic and the Maxwell equations is used to demonstrate that, near the
instability threshold, the nonlinear dynamics of mirror modes in a magnetized
plasma with anisotropic ion temperatures involves a subcritical
bifurcation,leading to the formation of small-scale structures with amplitudes
comparable with the ambient magnetic field
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