UV Properties of Galactic Globular Clusters with GALEX II. Integrated colors

We present ultraviolet (UV) integrated colors of 44 Galactic globular clusters (GGCs) observed with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) in both FUV and NUV bands. This data-base is the largest homogeneous catalog of UV colors ever published for stellar systems in our Galaxy. The proximity of GGCs makes it possible to resolve many individual stars even with the somewhat low spatial resolution of GALEX. This allows us to determine how the integrated UV colors are driven by hot stellar populations, primarily horizontal branch stars and their progeny. The UV colors are found to be correlated with various parameters commonly used to define the horizontal branch morphology. We also investigate how the UV colors vary with parameters like metallicity, age, helium abundance and concentration. We find for the first time that GCs associated with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy have (FUV-V) colors systematically redder than GGCs with the same metallicity. Finally, we speculate about the presence of an interesting trend, suggesting that the UV color of GCs may be correlated with the mass of the host galaxy, in the sense that more massive galaxies possess bluer clusters.Comment: Accepted for publication by The Astronomical Journal. 36 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl

Hot Populations in M87 Globular Clusters

We have obtained HST/STIS far- and near-UV photometry of globular clusters in four fields in the gE galaxy M87. To a limit of m(FUV) = 25 we detect a total of 66 globular clusters (GCs) in common with the deep HST optical-band study of Kundu et al. (1999). Despite strong overlap in V- and I-band properties, the M87 GCs have UV/optical properties that are distinct from clusters in the Milky Way and in M31. M87 clusters, especially metal-poor ones, produce larger hot HB populations than do Milky Way analogues. Cluster mass is probably not a factor in these distinctions. The most metal-rich M87 GCs in our sample are near Z_sun and overlap the local E galaxy sample in estimated Mg_2 line indices. Nonetheless, the clusters produce much more UV light at a given Mg_2, being up to 1 mag bluer than any gE galaxy in (FUV-V) color. The M87 GCs do not appear to represent a transition between Milky Way-type clusters and E galaxies. The differences are in the correct sense if the clusters are significantly older than the E galaxies. Comparisons with Galactic open clusters indicate that the hot stars lie on the extreme horizontal branch, rather than being blue stragglers, and that the EHB becomes well populated for ages > 5 Gyr. We find that 43 of our UV detections have no optical-band counterparts. Most appear to be UV-bright background galaxies, seen through M87. Eleven NUV variable sources detected at only one epoch in the central field are probably classical novae. [Abridged]Comment: 70 pages, 25 figures (including 4 jpgs), 7 tables. To appear in AJ. Full resolution version available at http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~rwo/m87/m87-hotpops.pd

Scalable Mining of Common Routes in Mobile Communication Network Traffic Data

A probabilistic method for inferring common routes from mobile communication network traffic data is presented. Besides providing mobility information, valuable in a multitude of application areas, the method has the dual purpose of enabling efficient coarse-graining as well as anonymisation by mapping individual sequences onto common routes. The approach is to represent spatial trajectories by Cell ID sequences that are grouped into routes using locality-sensitive hashing and graph clustering. The method is demonstrated to be scalable, and to accurately group sequences using an evaluation set of GPS tagged data

UV Bright Globular Clusters in M87: More Evidence for Super-helium-rich Stellar Populations?

We study the UV and optical properties of 38 massive GCs in M87, imaged using the HST/STIS and WFPC2 instruments. The majority of these GCs appear extremely bright in the FUV - roughly a magnitude brighter than their Galactic counterparts with similar metallicities. The observed FUV flux is several times larger than predictions of canonical old stellar population models. These canonical models, which assume a fiducial helium enrichment parameter, dY/dZ=2, are able to reproduce the observed FUV fluxes only if ages are 3--5 Gyr larger than the WMAP age of the Universe, although the same models fit the UV photometry of Galactic and M31 GCs for ages less than the WMAP age. A similar discrepancy is found between the mass-weighted and UV-luminosity weighted ages of the massive Galactic GC omega Cen, whose CMD (including peculiar features on its well-populated horizontal branch) can be accurately reproduced by invoking a small super-He-rich (dY/dZ ~ 90) stellar component. By comparison to omega Cen, we propose that the majority of M87 GCs in our sample contain strong signatures of similarly minor super-He-rich sub-components. Although we cannot prove or disprove the extreme helium scenario at the moment, we show that the same phenomenon that causes the extended horizontal branch of omega Cen explains the UV brightness of our sample. If this is indeed due to the extreme helium, this study would be the first to find its signatures in extragalactic objects.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

The F-GAMMA program: Multi-frequency study of Active Galactic Nuclei in the Fermi era. Program description and the first 2.5 years of monitoring

To fully exploit the scientific potential of the Fermi mission, we initiated the F-GAMMA program. Between 2007 and 2015 it was the prime provider of complementary multi-frequency monitoring in the radio regime. We quantify the radio variability of gamma-ray blazars. We investigate its dependence on source class and examine whether the radio variability is related to the gamma-ray loudness. Finally, we assess the validity of a putative correlation between the two bands. The F-GAMMA monitored monthly a sample of about 60 sources at up to twelve radio frequencies between 2.64 and 228.39 GHz. We perform a time series analysis on the first 2.5-year dataset to obtain variability parameters. A maximum likelihood analysis is used to assess the significance of a correlation between radio and gamma-ray fluxes. We present light curves and spectra (coherent within ten days) obtained with the Effelsberg 100-m and IRAM 30-m telescopes. All sources are variable across all frequency bands with amplitudes increasing with frequency up to rest frame frequencies of around 60 - 80 GHz as expected by shock-in-jet models. Compared to FSRQs, BL Lacs show systematically lower variability amplitudes, brightness temperatures and Doppler factors at lower frequencies, while the difference vanishes towards higher ones. The time scales appear similar for the two classes. The distribution of spectral indices appears flatter or more inverted at higher frequencies for BL Lacs. Evolving synchrotron self-absorbed components can naturally account for the observed spectral variability. We find that the Fermi-detected sources show larger variability amplitudes as well as brightness temperatures and Doppler factors, than non-detected ones. Flux densities at 86.2 and 142.3 GHz correlate with 1 GeV fluxes at a significance level better than 3sigma, implying that gamma rays are produced very close to the mm-band emission region.Comment: Accepted for publication in section 4. Extragalactic astronomy of Astronomy and Astrophysics (18 pages, 9 figures

X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy Study of the Effect of Rh Doping in Sr\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3eIrO\u3csub\u3e4\u3c/sub\u3e

We investigate the effect of Rh doping in Sr2IrO4 using X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS). We observed appearance of new electron-addition states with increasing Rh concentration (x in Sr2Ir1−xRhxO4) in accordance with the concept of hole doping. The intensity of the hole-induced state is however weak, suggesting weakness of charge transfer (CT) effect and Mott insulating ground states. Also, Ir Jeff = 1/2 upper Hubbard band shifts to lower energy as x increases up to x = 0.23. Combined with optical spectroscopy, these results suggest a hybridisation-related mechanism, in which Rh doping can weaken the (Ir Jeff = 1/2)–(O 2p) orbital hybridisation in the in-planar Rh-O-Ir bond networks