1,395 research outputs found
All-Sky spectrally matched UBVRI-ZY and u'g'r'i'z' magnitudes for stars in the Tycho2 catalog
We present fitted UBVRI-ZY and u'g'r'i'z' magnitudes, spectral types and
distances for 2.4M stars, derived from synthetic photometry of a library
spectrum that best matches the Tycho2 BtVt, NOMAD Rn and 2MASS JHK_{2/S}
catalog magnitudes. We present similarly synthesized multi-filter magnitudes,
types and distances for 4.8M stars with 2MASS and SDSS photometry to g<16
within the Sloan survey region, for Landolt and Sloan primary standards, and
for Sloan Northern (PT) and Southern secondary standards.
The synthetic magnitude zeropoints for BtVt, UBVRI, ZvYv, JHK_{2/S},
JHK_{MKO}, Stromgren uvby, Sloan u'g'r'i'z' and ugriz are calibrated on 20
calspec spectrophotometric standards. The UBVRI and ugriz zeropoints have
dispersions of 1--3%, for standards covering a range of color from -0.3 < V-I <
4.6; those for other filters are in the range 2--5%.
The spectrally matched fits to Tycho2 stars provide estimated 1-sigma errors
per star of ~0.2, 0.15, 0.12, 0.10 and 0.08 mags respectively in either UBVRI
or u'g'r'i'z'; those for at least 70% of the SDSS survey region to g<16 have
estimated 1-sigma errors per star of ~0.2, 0.06, 0.04, 0.04, 0.05 in u'g'r'i'z'
or UBVRI.
The density of Tycho2 stars, averaging about 60 stars per square degree,
provides sufficient stars to enable automatic flux calibrations for most
digital images with fields of view of 0.5 degree or more. Using several such
standards per field, automatic flux calibration can be achieved to a few
percent in any filter, at any airmass, in most workable observing conditions,
to facilitate inter-comparison of data from different sites, telescopes and
instruments.Comment: 36 pages, 30 figures, 3 printed tables, several electronic tables,
accepted PASP Dec 201
The age of the oldest globular clusters
The age of three of the oldest clusters -- M15, M68, M92 -- has been
redetermined. We use the latest EOS and opacity data available for calculating
both isochrones and zero age horizontal branches and employ the brightness
difference between turn-off and horizontal branch to determine the cluster age.
Our best ages for all three clusters are about 13 Gyr, and even smaller ages
are possible. Our results help to reconcile cluster ages with recent results on
the age of the universe determined from the Hubble constant.Comment: submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letter
The Peculiar Type Ia Supernova 1999by: Spectroscopy at Early Epochs
We present medium resolution (lambda/Delta lambda = 2500) optical
spectroscopy of SN 1999by in NGC 2841 made around its light maximum. The depth
ratio of the two Si II features at 5800 AA and 6150 AA being R(SiII) approx.
0.63 at maximum indicates that this SN belongs to the peculiar, sub-luminous
SNe Ia. Radial velocities inferred from the minimum of the 6150 AA trough
reveal a steeper decline of the velocity curve than expected for ``normal'' SNe
Ia, consistent with the behavior of published VRI light curves. A revised
absolute magnitude of SN 1999by and distance to its host galaxy NGC 2841 is
estimated based on the Multi-Color Light Curve Shape (MLCS) method, resulting
in M_V(max)=-18.06+/- 0.1 mag and d = 17.1+/-1.2 Mpc, respectively. An
approximative linear dependence of the luminosity parameter Delta on R(SiII) is
presented.Comment: accepted for publication in Astron. Journal (2001 June
Uncertainty-principle noise in vacuum-tunneling transducers
The fundamental sources of noise in a vacuum-tunneling probe used as an
electromechanical transducer to monitor the location of a test mass are
examined using a first-quantization formalism. We show that a tunneling
transducer enforces the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for the position and
momentum of a test mass monitored by the transducer through the presence of two
sources of noise: the shot noise of the tunneling current and the momentum
fluctuations transferred by the tunneling electrons to the test mass. We
analyze a number of cases including symmetric and asymmetric rectangular
potential barriers and a barrier in which there is a constant electric field.
Practical configurations for reaching the quantum limit in measurements of the
position of macroscopic bodies with such a class of transducers are studied
The uBVI Photometric System. I. Motivation, Implementation, and Calibration
This paper describes the design principles for a CCD-based photometric system
that is highly optimized for ground-based measurement of the size of the Balmer
jump in stellar energy distributions. It is shown that, among ultraviolet
filters in common use, the Thuan-Gunn u filter is the most efficient for this
purpose. This filter is combined with the standard Johnson-Kron-Cousins B, V,
and I bandpasses to constitute the uBVI photometric system.
Model stellar atmospheres are used to calibrate color-color diagrams for the
uBVI system in terms of the fundamental stellar parameters of effective
temperature, surface gravity, and metallicity. The u-B index is very sensitive
to log g, but also to [Fe/H]. It is shown that an analog of the Str\"omgren c_1
index, defined as (u-B)-(B-V), is much less metallicity dependent, but still
sensitive to log g. The effect of interstellar reddening on u-B is determined
through synthetic photometric calculations, and practical advice is given on
dealing with flat fields, atmospheric extinction, the red leak in the u filter,
and photometric reductions.
The uBVI system offers a wide range of applicability in detecting stars of
high luminosity in both young (yellow supergiants) and old (post-AGB stars)
populations, using stars of both types as standard candles to measure
extragalactic distances with high efficiency, and in exploring the horizontal
branch in globular clusters. In many stellar applications, it can profitably
replace the classical uBVI system.
Paper II in this series will present a network of well-calibrated standard
stars for the uBVI system.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables; accepted by A
Stellar pollution and [Fe/H] in the Hyades
The Hyades open cluster presents a unique laboratory for planet formation and
stellar pollution studies because all of the stars have essentially the same
age and were born from the same cloud of gas. Furthermore, with an age of
roughly 650 Myr most of the intermediate and low mass stars are on the main
sequence. Given these assumptions, the accretion of metal rich material onto
the surface of a star during and shortly after the formation of planetary
systems should be evident via the enhanced metallicity of the star. Building on
previous work, stellar evolution models which include the effects of stellar
pollution are applied to the Hyades. The results of several Monte Carlo
simulations, in which the amount of accreted material is drawn at random from a
Gaussian distribution with standard deviation equal to half the mean, are
presented. An effective temperature-[Fe/H] relation is produced and compared to
recent observations. The theoretical predictions presented in this letter will
be useful in future searches for evidence of stellar pollution due to planet
formation. It is concluded that stellar pollution effects at the mean level of
>=2 Earth masses of iron are ruled out by current observational data.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, AASTeX, accepted to the ApJ
Computing CMB Anisotropy in Compact Hyperbolic Spaces
The measurements of CMB anisotropy have opened up a window for probing the
global topology of the universe on length scales comparable to and beyond the
Hubble radius. For compact topologies, the two main effects on the CMB are: (1)
the breaking of statistical isotropy in characteristic patterns determined by
the photon geodesic structure of the manifold and (2) an infrared cutoff in the
power spectrum of perturbations imposed by the finite spatial extent. We
present a completely general scheme using the regularized method of images for
calculating CMB anisotropy in models with nontrivial topology, and apply it to
the computationally challenging compact hyperbolic topologies. This new
technique eliminates the need for the difficult task of spatial eigenmode
decomposition on these spaces. We estimate a Bayesian probability for a
selection of models by confronting the theoretical pixel-pixel temperature
correlation function with the COBE-DMR data. Our results demonstrate that
strong constraints on compactness arise: if the universe is small compared to
the `horizon' size, correlations appear in the maps that are irreconcilable
with the observations. If the universe is of comparable size, the likelihood
function is very dependent upon orientation of the manifold wrt the sky. While
most orientations may be strongly ruled out, it sometimes happens that for a
specific orientation the predicted correlation patterns are preferred over the
conventional infinite models.Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX (IOP style included), 3 color figures (GIF) in
separate files. Minor revision to match the version accepted in Class.
Quantum Grav.: Proc. of Topology and Cosmology, Cleveland, 1997. The paper
can be also downloaded from
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~pogosyan/cwru_proc.ps.g
Spectroscopy of Globular Clusters in M81
We present moderate-resolution spectroscopy of globular clusters (GCs) around
the Sa/Sb spiral galaxy M81 (NGC 3031). Sixteen candidate clusters were
observed with the Low Resolution Imaging Spectrograph on the Keck I telescope.
All are confirmed as bona fide GCs, although one of the clusters appears to
have been undergoing a transient event during our observations. In general, the
M81 globular cluster system (GCS) is found to be very similar to the Milky Way
(MW) and M31 systems, both chemically and kinematically. A kinematic analysis
of the velocities of 44 M81 GCS, (the 16 presented here and 28 from previous
work) strongly suggests that the red, metal-rich clusters are rotating in the
same sense as the gas in the disk of M81. The blue, metal-poor clusters have
halo-like kinematics, showing no evidence for rotation. The kinematics of
clusters whose projected galactocentric radii lie between 4 and 8 kpc suggest
that they are rotating much more than those which lie outside these bounds. We
suggest that these rotating, intermediate-distance clusters are analogous to
the kinematic sub-population in the metal-rich, disk GCs observed in the MW and
we present evidence for the existence of a similar sub-population in the
metal-rich clusters of M31. With one exception, all of the M81 clusters in our
sample have ages that are consistent with MW and M31 GCs. One cluster may be as
young as a few Gyrs. The correlations between absorption-line indices
established for MW and M31 GCs also hold in the M81 cluster system, at least at
the upper end of the metallicity distribution (which our sample probes). On the
whole, the mean metallicity of the M81 GCS is similar to the metallicity of the
MW and M31 GCSs. The projected mass of M81 is similar to the masses of the MW
and M31. Its mass profile indicates the presence of a dark matter halo.Comment: 35 pages, including 11 figures and 9 tables. Accepted for publication
in the Astronomical Journa
Determining the Physical Properties of the B Stars I. Methodology and First Results
We describe a new approach to fitting the UV-to-optical spectra of B stars to
model atmospheres and present initial results. Using a sample of lightly
reddened stars, we demonstrate that the Kurucz model atmospheres can produce
excellent fits to either combined low dispersion IUE and optical photometry or
HST FOS spectrophotometry, as long as the following conditions are fulfilled:
1) an extended grid of Kurucz models is employed,
2) the IUE NEWSIPS data are placed on the FOS absolute flux system using the
Massa & Fitzpatrick (1999) transformation, and
3) all of the model parameters and the effects of interstellar extinction are
solved for simultaneously.
When these steps are taken, the temperatures, gravities, abundances and
microturbulence velocities of lightly reddened B0-A0 V stars are determined to
high precision. We also demonstrate that the same procedure can be used to fit
the energy distributions of stars which are reddened by any UV extinction curve
which can be expressed by the Fitzpatrick & Massa (1990) parameterization
scheme.
We present an initial set of results and verify our approach through
comparisons with angular diameter measurements and the parameters derived for
an eclipsing B star binary. We demonstrate that the metallicity derived from
the ATLAS 9 fits to main sequence B stars is essentially the Fe abundance. We
find that a near zero microturbulence velocity provides the best-fit to all but
the hottest or most luminous stars (where it may become a surrogate for
atmospheric expansion), and that the use of white dwarfs to calibrate UV
spectrophotometry is valid.Comment: 17 pages, including 2 pages of Tables and 6 pages of Figures.
Astrophysical Jounral, in pres
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