5,374 research outputs found
Observations of stratospheric aerosols associated with the El Chichon eruption
Lidar observations of aerosols were carried out at Aberystwyth between Nov. 1982 and Dec. 1985 using a frequency doubled and frequency tripled Nd/Yag laser and a receiver incorporating a 1 m diameter in a Newtonian telescope configuration. In analyses of the experimental data attention is paid to the magnitude of the coefficient relating extinction and backscatter, the choice being related to the possible presence of aerosols in the upper troposphere and the atmospheric densities employed in the normalisation procedure. The aerosol loading showed marked day to day changes in early months and an overall decay was apparent only after April 1983, this decay being consistent with an e sup -1 time of about 7 months. The general decay was accompanied by a lowering of the layer but layers of aerosols were shown intermittently at heights above the main layer in winter months. The height variations of photon counts corrected for range, or of aerosol backscatter ratio, showed clear signatures of the tropopause. A strong correlation was found between the heights of the tropopause identified from the lidar measurements and from radiosonde-borne temperature measurements. A notable feature of the observations is the appearance of very sharp height gradients of backscatter ratio which seem to be produced by differential advection
A homoleptic phosphine adduct of Tl(I)
A homoleptic phosphine adduct of thallium(I) supported by a tris(phosphino)borate ligand has been isolated and structurally characterized
Pion-Nucleon Phase Shifts in Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory
We calculate the phase shifts in the pion-nucleon scattering using the heavy
baryon formalism. We consider phase shifts for the pion energy range of 140 to
MeV. We employ two different methods for calculating the phase shifts -
the first using the full third order calculation of the pion-nucleon scattering
amplitude and the second by including the resonances and as
explicit degrees of freedom in the Lagrangian. We compare the results of the
two methods with phase shifts extracted from fits to the pion-nucleon
scattering data. We find good to fair agreement between the calculations and
the phase shifts from scattering data.Comment: 14 pages, Latex, 6figures. Revised version to appear in Phys.Rev.
Peculiar Velocities of Galaxy Clusters
We investigate the peculiar velocities predicted for galaxy clusters by
theories in the cold dark matter family. A widely used hypothesis identifies
rich clusters with high peaks of a suitably smoothed version of the linear
density fluctuation field. Their peculiar velocities are then obtained by
extrapolating the similarly smoothed linear peculiar velocities at the
positions of these peaks. We test these ideas using large high resolution
N-body simulations carried out within the Virgo supercomputing consortium. We
find that at early times the barycentre of the material which ends up in a rich
cluster is generally very close to a high peak of the initial density field.
Furthermore the mean peculiar velocity of this material agrees well with the
linear value at the peak. The late-time growth of peculiar velocities is,
however, systematically underestimated by linear theory. At the time clusters
are identified we find their rms peculiar velocity to be about 40% larger than
predicted. Nonlinear effects are particularly important in superclusters. These
systematics must be borne in mind when using cluster peculiar velocities to
estimate the parameter combination .Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; submitted to MNRA
Night-time lighting alters the composition of marine epifaunal communities
Marine benthic communities face multiple anthropogenic pressures that compromise the future of some of the most biodiverse and functionally important ecosystems in the world. Yet one of the pressures these ecosystems face, night-time lighting, remains unstudied. Light is an important cue in guiding the settlement of invertebrate larvae, and altering natural regimes of nocturnal illumination could modify patterns of recruitment among sessile epifauna. We present the first evidence of night-time lighting changing the composition of temperate epifaunal marine invertebrate communities. Illuminating settlement surfaces with white light-emitting diode lighting at night, to levels experienced by these communities locally, both inhibited and encouraged the colonization of 39% of the taxa analysed, including three sessile and two mobile species. Our results indicate that ecological light pollution from coastal development, shipping and offshore infrastructure could be changing the composition of marine epifaunal communities.European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework programme (FP7/2007-2013
Kepler Presearch Data Conditioning I - Architecture and Algorithms for Error Correction in Kepler Light Curves
Kepler provides light curves of 156,000 stars with unprecedented precision.
However, the raw data as they come from the spacecraft contain significant
systematic and stochastic errors. These errors, which include discontinuities,
systematic trends, and outliers, obscure the astrophysical signals in the light
curves. To correct these errors is the task of the Presearch Data Conditioning
(PDC) module of the Kepler data analysis pipeline. The original version of PDC
in Kepler did not meet the extremely high performance requirements for the
detection of miniscule planet transits or highly accurate analysis of stellar
activity and rotation. One particular deficiency was that astrophysical
features were often removed as a side-effect to removal of errors. In this
paper we introduce the completely new and significantly improved version of PDC
which was implemented in Kepler SOC 8.0. This new PDC version, which utilizes a
Bayesian approach for removal of systematics, reliably corrects errors in the
light curves while at the same time preserving planet transits and other
astrophysically interesting signals. We describe the architecture and the
algorithms of this new PDC module, show typical errors encountered in Kepler
data, and illustrate the corrections using real light curve examples.Comment: Submitted to PASP. Also see companion paper "Kepler Presearch Data
Conditioning II - A Bayesian Approach to Systematic Error Correction" by Jeff
C. Smith et a
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