13,184 research outputs found
ALMA observations of the Red Rectangle, a preliminary analysis
We aim to study equatorial disks in rotation and axial outflows in post-AGB
objects, as to disclose the formation and shaping mechanisms in planetary
nebulae. So far, both disks and outflows had not been observed simultaneously.
We have obtained high-quality ALMA observations of 12CO and 13CO J=3-2 and
12CO J=6-5 line emission in the Red Rectangle, the only post-AGB/protoplanetary
object in which a disk in rotation has been mapped up to date.
These observations provide an unprecedented description of the complex
structure of this source. Together with an equatorial disk in rotation, we find
a low-velocity outflow that occupies more or less the region placed between the
disk and the optical X-shaped nebula. From our observations and preliminary
modeling of the data, we confirm the previously known properties of the disk
and obtain a first description of the structure, dynamics, and physical
conditions of the outflow.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Recommended from our members
Implementation research for the prevention of antimicrobial resistance and healthcare-associated infections; 2017 Geneva infection prevention and control (IPC)-think tank (part 1)
Background
Around 5â15% of all hospital patients worldwide suffer from healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), and years of excessive antimicrobial use in human and animal medicine have created emerging antimicrobial resistance (AMR). A considerable amount of evidence-based measures have been published to address these challenges, but the largest challenge seems to be their implementation.
Methods
In June 2017, a total of 42 experts convened at the Geneva IPC-Think Tank to discuss four domains in implementation science: 1) teaching implementation skills; 2) fostering implementation of IPC and antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) by policy making; 3) national/international actions to foster implementation skills; and 4) translational research bridging social sciences and clinical research in infection prevention and control (IPC) and AMR.
Results
Although neglected in the past, implementation skills have become a priority in IPC and AMS. They should now be part of any curriculum in health care, and IPC career paths should be created. Guidelines and policies should be aligned with each other and evidence-based, each document providing a section on implementing elements of IPC and AMS in patient care. International organisations should be advocates for IPC and AMS, framing them as patient safety issues and emphasizing the importance of implementation skills. Healthcare authorities at the national level should adopt a similar approach and provide legal frameworks, guidelines, and resources to allow better implementation of patient safety measures in IPC and AMS. Rather than repeating effectiveness studies in every setting, we should invest in methods to improve the implementation of evidence-based measures in different healthcare contexts. For this, we need to encourage and financially support collaborations between social sciences and clinical IPC research.
Conclusions
Experts of the 2017 Geneva Think Tank on IPC and AMS, CDC, and WHO agreed that sustained efforts on implementation of IPC and AMS strategies are required at international, country, and hospital management levels, to provide an adequate multimodal framework that addresses (not exclusively) leadership, resources, education and training for implementing IPC and AMS. Future strategies can build on this agreement to make strategies on IPC and AMS more effective
X-Ray Flares and Oscillations from the Black Hole Candidate X-Ray Transient XTE J1650-500 at Low Luminosity
We report on X-ray observations made with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer of
the black hole candidate (BHC) transient XTE J1650-500 at the end of its first,
and currently only, outburst. By monitoring the source at low luminosities over
several months, we found 6 bright ~100 second X-ray flares and long time scale
oscillations of the X-ray flux. The oscillations are aperiodic with a
characteristic time scale of 14.2 days and an order of magnitude variation in
the 2.8-20 keV flux. The oscillations may be related to optical
"mini-outbursts" that have been observed at the ends of outbursts for other
short orbital period BHC transients. The X-ray flares have durations between 62
and 215 seconds and peak fluxes that are 5-24 times higher than the persistent
flux. The flares have non-thermal energy spectra and occur when the persistent
luminosity is near 3E34 (d/4 kpc)^2 erg/s (2.8-20 keV). The rise time for the
brightest flare demonstrates that physical models for BHC systems must be able
to account for the situation where the X-ray flux increases by a factor of up
to 24 on a time scale of seconds. We discuss the flares in the context of
observations and theory of Galactic BHCs and compare the flares to those
detected from Sgr A*, the super-massive black hole at the Galactic center. We
also compare the flares to X-ray bursts that are seen in neutron star systems.
While some of the flare light curves are similar to those of neutron star
bursts, the flares have non-thermal energy spectra in contrast to the blackbody
spectra exhibited in bursts. This indicates that X-ray bursts should not be
taken as evidence that a given system contains a neutron star unless the
presence of a blackbody component in the burst spectrum can be demonstrated.Comment: 9 pages, accepted by Ap
Fossil group origins V. The dependence of the luminosity function on the magnitude gap
In nature we observe galaxy aggregations that span a wide range of magnitude
gaps between the two first-ranked galaxies of a system (). There
are systems with gaps close to zero (e.g., the Coma cluster), and at the other
extreme of the distribution, the largest gaps are found among the so-called
fossil systems. Fossil and non-fossil systems could have different galaxy
populations that should be reflected in their luminosity functions. In this
work we study, for the first time, the dependence of the luminosity function
parameters on using data obtained by the fossil group origins
(FOGO) project. We constructed a hybrid luminosity function for 102 groups and
clusters at . We stacked all the individual luminosity functions,
dividing them into bins of , and studied their best-fit
Schechter parameters. We additionally computed a relative luminosity function,
expressed as a function of the central galaxy luminosity, which boosts our
capacity to detect differences, especially at the bright end. We find trends as
a function of at both the bright and faint ends of the
luminosity function. In particular, at the bright end, the larger the magnitude
gap, the fainter the characteristic magnitude . We also find
differences at the faint end. In this region, the larger the gap, the flatter
the faint-end slope . The differences found at the bright end support a
dissipationless, dynamical friction-driven merging model for the growth of the
central galaxy in group- and cluster-sized halos. The differences in the faint
end cannot be explained by this mechanism. Other processes, such as enhanced
tidal disruption due to early infall and/or prevalence of eccentric orbits, may
play a role. However, a larger sample of systems with is
needed to establish the differences at the faint end.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in A&
Stability of insulating phase in the chiral Kondo lattice model
In this work, the stability of the insulating phase of the 1D chiral Kondo
lattice model is studied at half-filling, within the framework of
self-consistent variational theory. It is found that arbitrarily small
interaction would drive the system from a conducting phase to an insulating
phase, in spite of the chirality of the conducting band.Comment: 10 pages, IPT-EPFL preprint, submitted to PRB as a brief report for
publicatio
Fossil Groups Origins III. The relation between optical and X-ray luminosities
This study is part of the FOssil Groups Origin (FOGO) project which aims at
carrying out a systematic and multiwavelength study of a large sample of fossil
systems. Here we focus on the relation between the optical luminosity (Lopt)
and X-ray luminosity (Lx). Out of a sample of 28 candidate fossil systems, we
consider a sample of 12 systems whose fossil classification has been confirmed
by a companion study. They are compared with the complementary sample of 16
systems whose fossil nature is not confirmed and with a subsample of 102 galaxy
systems from the RASS-SDSS galaxy cluster survey. Fossil and normal systems
span the same redshift range 0<z<0.5 and have the same Lx distribution. For
each fossil system, the Lx in the 0.1-2.4 keV band is computed using data from
the ROSAT All Sky Survey. For each fossil and normal system we homogeneously
compute Lopt in the r-band within the characteristic cluster radius, using data
from the SDSS DR7. We sample the Lx-Lopt relation over two orders of magnitude
in Lx. Our analysis shows that fossil systems are not statistically
distinguishable from the normal systems both through the 2D KS test and the fit
of the Lx-Lopt relation. The optical luminosity of the galaxy system does
strongly correlate with the X-ray luminosity of the hot gas component,
independently of whether the system is fossil or not. We conclude that our
results are consistent with the classical "merging scenario" of the brightest
galaxy formed via merger/cannibalism of other group galaxies, with conservation
of the optical light. We find no evidence for a peculiar state of the hot
intracluster medium.Comment: A&A, 12 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, typos corr. and paper re-numbe
High frequency quasi-periodic oscillations in the black hole X-ray transient XTE J1650-500
We report the detection of high frequency variability in the black hole X-ray
transient XTE J1650-500. A quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) was found at 250 Hz
during a transition from the hard to the soft state. We also detected less
coherent variability around 50 Hz, that disappeared when the 250 Hz QPO showed
up. There are indications that when the energy spectrum hardened the QPO
frequency increased from ~110 Hz to ~270 Hz, although the observed frequencies
are also consistent with being 1:2:3 harmonics of each other. Interpreting the
250 Hz as the orbital frequency at the innermost stable orbit around a
Schwarzschild black hole leads to a mass estimate of 8.2 Msun. The spectral
results by Miller et al.(2002, ApJ, 570, L69), which suggest considerable black
hole spin, would imply a higher mass.Comment: Submitted to ApJ, 12 pages including 2 figure
Herschel/HIFI observations of molecular emission in protoplanetary nebulae and young planetary nebulae
We performed Herschel/HIFI observations of intermediate-excitation molecular
lines in the far-infrared/submillimeter range in a sample of ten protoplanetary
nebulae and young planetary nebulae. The high spectral resolution provided by
HIFI yields accurate measurements of the line profiles. The observation of
these high-energy transitions allows an accurate study of the excitation
conditions, particularly in the warm gas, which cannot be properly studied from
the low-energy lines.
We have detected FIR/sub-mm lines of several molecules, in particular of
12CO, 13CO, and H2O. Emission from other species, like NH3, OH, H2^{18}O, HCN,
SiO, etc, has been also detected. Wide profiles showing sometimes spectacular
line wings have been found. We have mainly studied the excitation properties of
the high-velocity emission, which is known to come from fast bipolar outflows.
From comparison with general theoretical predictions, we find that CRL 618
shows a particularly warm fast wind, with characteristic kinetic temperature Tk
>~ 200 K. In contrast, the fast winds in OH 231.8+4.2 and NGC 6302 are cold, Tk
~ 30 K. Other nebulae, like CRL 2688, show intermediate temperatures, with
characteristic values around 100 K. We also discuss how the complex structure
of the nebulae can affect our estimates, considering two-component models. We
argue that the differences in temperature in the different nebulae can be due
to cooling after the gas acceleration (that is probably due to shocks); for
instance, CRL 618 is a case of very recent acceleration, less than ~ 100 yr
ago, while the fast gas in OH 231.8+4.2 was accelerated ~ 1000 yr ago. We also
find indications that the densest gas tends to be cooler, which may be
explained by the expected increase of the radiative cooling efficiency with the
density.Comment: 24 pages, 31 figure
Systematic first-principles study of impurity hybridization in NiAl
We have performed a systematic first-principles computational study of the
effects of impurity atoms (boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, phosporus,
and sulfur) on the orbital hybridization and bonding properties in the
intermetallic alloy NiAl using a full-potential linear muffin-tin orbital
method. The matrix elements in momentum space were used to calculate real-space
properties: onsite parameters, partial densities of states, and local charges.
In impurity atoms that are empirically known to be embrittler (N and O) we
found that the 2s orbital is bound to the impurity and therefore does not
participate in the covalent bonding. In contrast, the corresponding 2s orbital
is found to be delocalized in the cohesion enhancers (B and C). Each of these
impurity atoms is found to acquire a net negative local charge in NiAl
irrespective of whether they sit in the Ni or Al site. The embrittler therefore
reduces the total number of electrons available for covalent bonding by
removing some of the electrons from the neighboring Ni or Al atoms and
localizing them at the impurity site. We show that these correlations also hold
for silicon, phosporus, and sulfur.Comment: Revtex, 8 pages, 7 eps figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Relationship between Determinants of Health, Equity, and Dimensions of Health Literacy in Patients with Cardiovascular Disease
Background: Health literacy (HL) has been linked to empowerment, use of health services, and equity. Evaluating HL in people with cardiovascular health problems would facilitate the development of suitable health strategies care and reduce inequity. Aim: To investigate the relationship between different dimensions that make up HL and social determinants in patients with cardiovascular disease. Methods: Observational, descriptive, cross-sectional study in patients with cardiovascular disease, aged 50-85 years, accessing primary care services in Valencia (Spain) in 2018-2019. The Health Literacy Questionnaire was used. Results: 252 patients. Age was significantly related with the ability to participate with healthcare providers (p = 0.043), ability to find information (p = 0.022), and understanding information correctly to know what to do (p = 0.046). Level of education was significant for all HL dimensions. Patients without studies scored lower in all dimensions. The low- versus middle-class social relationship showed significant results in all dimensions. Conclusions: In patients with cardiovascular disease, level of education and social class were social determinants associated with HL scores. Whilst interventions at individual level might address some HL deficits, inequities in access to cardiovascular care and health outcomes would remain unjustly balanced unless structural determinants of HL are taken into account
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