The most luminous, merger-free AGN show only marginal correlation with bar presence

The role of large-scale bars in the fuelling of active galactic nuclei (AGN) is still debated, even as evidence mounts that black hole growth in the absence of galaxy mergers cumulatively dominated and may substantially influence disc (i.e., merger-free) galaxy evolution. We investigate whether large-scale galactic bars are a good candidate for merger-free AGN fuelling. Specifically, we combine slit spectroscopy and Hubble Space Telescope imagery to characterise star formation rates (SFRs) and stellar masses of the unambiguously disc-dominated host galaxies of a sample of luminous, Type-1 AGN with 0.02 < z 0.024. After carefully correcting for AGN signal, we find no clear difference in SFR between AGN hosts and a stellar mass-matched sample of galaxies lacking an AGN (0.013 < z < 0.19), although this could be due to a small sample size (n_AGN = 34). We correct for SFR and stellar mass to minimise selection biases, and compare the bar fraction in the two samples. We find that AGN are marginally (1.7$\sigma$) more likely to host a bar than inactive galaxies, with AGN hosts having a bar fraction, fbar = 0.59^{+0.08}_{-0.09} and inactive galaxies having a bar fraction fbar = 0.44^{+0.08}_{-0.09}. However, we find no further differences between SFR- and mass-matched AGN and inactive samples. While bars could potentially trigger AGN activity, they appear to have no further, unique effect on a galaxy's stellar mass or SFR.Comment: 15 pages (9 figures). Accepted for publication in MNRA

The most luminous, merger-free AGN show only marginal correlation with bar presence

The role of large-scale bars in the fuelling of active galactic nuclei (AGN) is still debated, even as evidence mounts that black hole growth in the absence of galaxy mergers cumulatively dominates and may substantially influence disc (i.e., merger-free) galaxy evolution. We investigate whether large-scale galactic bars are a good candidate for merger-free AGN fuelling. Specifically, we combine slit spectroscopy and Hubble Space Telescope imagery to characterise star formation rates (SFRs) and stellar masses of the unambiguously disc-dominated host galaxies of a sample of luminous, Type-1 AGN with 0.02 < < 0.24. After carefully correcting for AGN signal, we find no clear difference in SFR between AGN hosts and a stellar mass-matched sample of galaxies lacking an AGN (0.013 < < 0.19), although this could be due to small sample size (AGN = 34). We correct for SFR and stellar mass to minimise selection biases, and compare the bar fraction in the two samples. We find that AGN are marginally (∼ 1.7σ) more likely to host a bar than inactive galaxies, with AGN hosts having a bar fraction, bar = 0.59+0.08 −0.09 and inactive galaxies having a bar fraction, bar = 0.44+0.08 −0.09. However, we find no further differences between SFR- and mass-matched AGN and inactive samples. While bars could potentially trigger AGN activity, they appear to have no further, unique effect on a galaxy’s stellar mass or SF

Gems of the Galaxy Zoos—A Wide-ranging Hubble Space Telescope Gap-filler Program*

We describe the Gems of the Galaxy Zoos (Zoo Gems) project, a gap-filler project using short windows in the Hubble Space Telescope's schedule. As with previous snapshot programs, targets are taken from a pool based on position; we combine objects selected by volunteers in both the Galaxy Zoo and Radio Galaxy Zoo citizen-science projects. Zoo Gems uses exposures with the Advanced Camera for Surveys to address a broad range of topics in galaxy morphology, interstellar-medium content, host galaxies of active galactic nuclei, and galaxy evolution. Science cases include studying galaxy interactions, backlit dust in galaxies, post-starburst systems, rings and peculiar spiral patterns, outliers from the usual color–morphology relation, Green Pea compact starburst systems, double radio sources with spiral host galaxies, and extended emission-line regions around active galactic nuclei. For many of these science categories, final selection of targets from a larger list used public input via a voting process. Highlights to date include the prevalence of tightly wound spiral structure in blue, apparently early-type galaxies, a nearly complete Einstein ring from a group lens, redder components at lower surface brightness surrounding compact Green Pea starbursts, and high-probability examples of spiral galaxies hosting large double radio sources

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

reNotate: The Crowdsourcing and Gamification of Symbolic Music Encoding

Presented at the 2nd Web Audio Conference (WAC), April 4-6, 2016, Atlanta, Georgia.Musicologists and music theorists have, for quite some time, hoped to be able to make use of computational methods to examine large corpora of music. As far back as the 1940s, an IBM card-sorter was used to implement patternfinding in traditional British folk songs (Bronson 1949, 1959). Alan Lomax famously implemented statistical methods in his Cantometrics project (Lomax, 1968), which sought to collate a large corpus of folk music from across many cultures. In the 1980s and 90s, a number of encoding projects were instituted in an attempt to be able to make searchable music notation on a large scale. The Essen Folksong Collection (Schaffrath, 1995) collected ethnographic transcriptions, whereas projects at the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) focused on scores in the Western Art Music tradition (Bach chorales, Mozart sonatas, instrumental themes, etc.). Recently, scholars have focused on improving Optical Music Recognition, in the hopes of facilitating the acquisition of large numbers of musical scores (Fujinaga, et al., 2014), but non-notated music, such as improvisational jazz, is often overlooked. While there have been many advances in music information retrieval in recent years, parameters that would facilitate in-depth musicological analysis are still out of reach (for example, stream segregation to examine specific melodic lines, or the analysis of harmony at a resolution that would allow for an analysis of specific chord voicings). Our project seeks to implement methods similar to those used in CAPTCHA and RECAPTCHA technology to crowdsource the symbolic encoding of musical information through a web-based gaming interface. The introductory levels ask participants to tap along with an audio recording's tempo, giving us an approximate BPM, while the second level asks for participants to tap with onsets. The third level asks them to match a contour of a three-note segment, and the final stage asks for specific note matching within that contour. A social-gaming interface allows for users to compete against one another. It is our hope that this work can be generalized to many types of musical genres, and that a web-based framework might facilitate the encoding of musicological and music-theoretic datasets that might be underrepresented by current MIR work

CLARIT Experiments in Batch Filtering: Term Selection and Threshold Optimization in IR and SVM Filters

The Clairvoyance team participated in the Filtering Track, submitting two runs in the Batch Filtering category. While we have been exploring the question of both topic modeling and ensemble filter construction (a

CLARIT Experiments in Batch Filtering:

Introduction The Clairvoyance team participated in the Filtering Track, submitting two runs in the Batch Filtering category. While we have been exploring the question of both topic modeling and ensemble filter construction (as in our previous TREC filtering experiments [5]), we had one distinct objective this year, to explore the viability of monolithic filters in classification-like tasks. This is appropriate to our work, in part, because monolithic filters are a crucial starting point for ensemble filtering, and it is possible for them to contribute substantially in the ensemble approach. Our primary goal in experiments this year, thus, was to explore two issues in monolithic filter construction: (1) term count selection and (2) filter threshold optimization. In fact, our pre-TREC experiments were conducted in a brief period and we were unable to complete all the tests we had planned. Our official submissions reflect essentially our first, baseline results. They are overall poor i

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&lt;h2&gt;Bug Fixes&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fixed bug which did not update all references to a viewer's ID when updating a viewer's reference name. [#2479]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Deleting a subset while actively editing it now deselects the subset tool, preventing the appearance of &quot;ghost&quot; subsets. [#2497]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fixes a bug in plot options where switching from multi to single-select mode failed to properly update the selection. [#2505]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cubeviz&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fixed moment map losing WCS when being written out to FITS file. [#2431]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fixed parsing for VLT MUSE data cube so spectral axis unit is correctly converted. [#2504]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Updated glue-core pin to fix the green layer that would appear if 2D data was added to image viewers while spectral subsets were defined. [#2527]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Specviz&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;Spectrum that has incompatible flux unit with what is already loaded will no longer be loaded as ghost spectrum. It will now be rejected with an error message on the snackbar. [#2485]&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Other Changes and Additions&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;Compatibility with Python 3.12. [#2473]&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt;If you use this software, please cite it as below