A Model of Habitability Within the Milky Way Galaxy

We present a model of the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ), described in terms of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the Galaxy that may favour the development of complex life. The Milky Way galaxy is modelled using a computational approach by populating stars and their planetary systems on an individual basis using Monte-Carlo methods. We begin with well-established properties of the disk of the Milky Way, such as the stellar number density distribution, the initial mass function, the star formation history, and the metallicity gradient as a function of radial position and time. We vary some of these properties, creating four models to test the sensitivity of our assumptions. To assess habitability on the Galactic scale, we model supernova rates, planet formation, and the time required for complex life to evolve. Our study improves on other literature on the GHZ by populating stars on an individual basis and by modelling SNII and SNIa sterilizations by selecting their progenitors from within this preexisting stellar population. Furthermore, we consider habitability on tidally locked and non-tidally locked planets separately, and study habitability as a function of height above and below the Galactic midplane. In the model that most accurately reproduces the properties of the Galaxy, the results indicate that an individual SNIa is ~5.6 \times more lethal than an individual SNII on average. In addition, we predict that ~1.2% of all stars host a planet that may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the Galaxy. Of those stars with a habitable planet, ~75% of planets are predicted to be in a tidally locked configuration with their host star. The majority of these planets that may support complex life are found towards the inner Galaxy, distributed within, and significantly above and below, the Galactic midplane.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astrobiology. 40 pages, 12 figures, 3 table

Outer Regions of the Milky Way

With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the Milky Way disk population. Its stellar content, its structure and its dynamical and chemical evolution are summarized, focussing on our lack of understanding both from an observational and a theoretical viewpoint. We describe the unprecedented data that Gaia and the upcoming ground-based spectroscopic surveys will provide in the next decade. More in detail, we quantify the expect accuracy in position, velocity and astrophysical parameters of some of the key tracers of the stellar populations in the outer Galactic disk. Some insights on the future capability of these surveys to answer crucial and fundamental issues are discussed, such as the mechanisms driving the spiral arms and the warp formation. Our Galaxy, theMilkyWay, is our cosmological laboratory for understanding the process of formation and evolution of disk galaxies. What we learn in the next decades will be naturally transferred to the extragalactic domain.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, Invited review, Book chapter in "Outskirts of Galaxies", Eds. J. H. Knapen, J. C. Lee and A. Gil de Paz, Astrophysics and Space Science Library, Springer, in pres

The discontinuous nature of chromospheric activity evolution

Chromospheric activity has been thought to decay smoothly with time and, hence, to be a viable age indicator. Measurements in solar type stars in open clusters seem to point to a different conclusion: chromospheric activity undergoes a fast transition from Hyades level to that of the Sun after about 1 Gyr of main--sequence lifetime and any decaying trend before or after this transition must be much less significant than the short term variations.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, to be published in Astrophysics and Space Scienc

Cartography of Triangulum-Andromeda using SDSS stars

The outer Galactic halo is home to a number of substructures which still have an uncertain origin, but most likely are remnants of former interactions between the Galaxy and its former satellites. Triangulum-Andromeda (TriAnd) is one of these halo substructures, found as an overdensity of Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) M giants. We analysed the region of TriAnd using photometric data from the Ninth Data Release of Sloan Digital Sky Survey. By comparing the observations with simulations from the TRILEGAL Galactic model, we were able to identify and map several scattered overdensities of main-sequence stars that seem to be associated with TriAnd over a large area covering ∼500 deg2. One of these excesses may represent a new stellar overdensity.We also briefly discuss an alternative hypothesis, according to which TriAnd is one of the troughs of oscillation rings in the Galactic disc

The Dark Matter Density in the Solar Neighborhood reconsidered

Both the gas flaring and the dip in the rotation curve, which was recently reconfirmed with precise measurements using the VERA VLBI array in Japan, suggest doughnut-like substructure in the dark matter (DM) halo. A global fit to all available data shows that the data are indeed best described by an NFW DM profile complemented by two doughnut-like DM substructures with radii of 4.2 and 12.4 kpc, which coincide with the local dust ring and the Monocerus ring of stars, respectively. Both regions have been suggested as regions with tidal streams from "shredded" satellites. If real, the radial extensions of these nearby ringlike structures enhance the local dark matter density by a factor of four to about 1.3$\pm0.3$ GeV/cm$^3$. It is shown that i) this higher DM density is perfectly consistent with the local gravitational potential determining the surface density and the local matter density (Oort limit), ii) previous determinations of the surface density were biased by the assumption of a smoothly varying DM halo and iii) the s-shaped gas flaring is explained. Such a possible enhancement of the local DM density is of great interest for direct DM searches and would change the directional dependence for indirect DM searches.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, extended version, accepted for publication in JCA

Oxygen abundance in local disk and bulge: chemical evolution with a strictly universal IMF

The empirical differential oxygen abundance distribution (EDOD) is deduced from subsamples related to two different samples involving solar neighbourhood (SN) thick disk, thin disk, halo, and bulge stars. The EDOD of the SN thick + thin disk is determined by weighting the mass, for assumed SN thick to thin disk mass ratio within the range, 0.1-0.9. Inhomogeneous models of chemical evolution for the SN thick disk, the SN thin disk, the SN thick + thin disk, the SN halo, and the bulge, are computed assuming the instantaneous recycling approximation. The EDOD data are fitted, to an acceptable extent, by their TDOD counterparts provided (i) still undetected, low-oxygen abundance thin disk stars exist, and (ii) a single oxygen overabundant star is removed from a thin disk subsample. In any case, the (assumed power-law) stellar initial mass function (IMF) is universal but gas can be inhibited from, or enhanced in, forming stars at different rates with respect to a selected reference case. Models involving a strictly universal IMF (i.e. gas neither inhibited from, nor enhanced in, forming stars with respect to a selected reference case) can also reproduce the data. The existence of a strictly universal IMF makes similar chemical enrichment within active (i.e. undergoing star formation) regions placed in different environments, but increasing probability of a region being active passing from SN halo to SN thick + thin disk, SN thin disk, SN thick disk, and bulge. On the basis of the results, it is realized that the chemical evolution of the SN thick + thin disk as a whole cannot be excluded.Comment: 26 pages, 10 tables, and 5 figures; tables out of page are splitted in two parts in Appendix B; sects.4 and 5 rewritten for better understanding of the results; further references added. Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Scienc

Horizontal Branch Stars: The Interplay between Observations and Theory, and Insights into the Formation of the Galaxy

We review HB stars in a broad astrophysical context, including both variable and non-variable stars. A reassessment of the Oosterhoff dichotomy is presented, which provides unprecedented detail regarding its origin and systematics. We show that the Oosterhoff dichotomy and the distribution of globular clusters (GCs) in the HB morphology-metallicity plane both exclude, with high statistical significance, the possibility that the Galactic halo may have formed from the accretion of dwarf galaxies resembling present-day Milky Way satellites such as Fornax, Sagittarius, and the LMC. A rediscussion of the second-parameter problem is presented. A technique is proposed to estimate the HB types of extragalactic GCs on the basis of integrated far-UV photometry. The relationship between the absolute V magnitude of the HB at the RR Lyrae level and metallicity, as obtained on the basis of trigonometric parallax measurements for the star RR Lyrae, is also revisited, giving a distance modulus to the LMC of (m-M)_0 = 18.44+/-0.11. RR Lyrae period change rates are studied. Finally, the conductive opacities used in evolutionary calculations of low-mass stars are investigated. [ABRIDGED]Comment: 56 pages, 22 figures. Invited review, to appear in Astrophysics and Space Scienc

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02

Search for displaced vertices arising from decays of new heavy particles in 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

We present the results of a search for new, heavy particles that decay at a significant distance from their production point into a final state containing charged hadrons in association with a high-momentum muon. The search is conducted in a pp-collision data sample with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 33 pb^-1 collected in 2010 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Production of such particles is expected in various scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. We observe no signal and place limits on the production cross-section of supersymmetric particles in an R-parity-violating scenario as a function of the neutralino lifetime. Limits are presented for different squark and neutralino masses, enabling extension of the limits to a variety of other models.Comment: 8 pages plus author list (20 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version to appear in Physics Letters