55,577 research outputs found

    Dust in the Local Group

    Full text link
    How dust absorbs and scatters starlight as a function of wavelength (known as the interstellar extinction curve) is crucial for correcting for the effects of dust extinction in inferring the true luminosity and colors of reddened astrophysical objects. Together with the extinction spectral features, the extinction curve contains important information about the dust size distribution and composition. This review summarizes our current knowledge of the dust extinction of the Milky Way, three Local Group galaxies (i.e., the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, and M31), and galaxies beyond the Local Group.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures; invited review article published in "LESSONS FROM THE LOCAL GROUP -- A Conference in Honour of David Block and Bruce Elmegreen" eds. Freeman, K.C., Elmegreen, B.G., Block, D.L. & Woolway, M. (SPRINGER: NEW YORK), pp. 85-10

    The Mid-Infrared Extinction Law and its Variation in the Coalsack Nebula

    Full text link
    In recent years the wavelength dependence of interstellar extinction from the ultraviolet (UV), optical, through the near- and mid-infrared (IR) has been studied extensively. Although it is well established that the UV/optical extinction law varies significantly among the different lines of sight, it is not clear how the IR extinction varies among various environments. In this work, using the color-excess method and taking red giants as the extinction tracer, we determine the interstellar extinction Alambda in the four Spitzer/IRAC bands of the Coalsack nebula, a nearby starless dark cloud, based on the data obtained from the 2MASS and Spitzer/GLIMPSE surveys. We select five individual regions across the nebula that span a wide variety of physical conditions, ranging from diffuse, translucent to dense environments, as traced by the visual extinction, the Spitzer/MIPS 24micron emission, and CO emission. We find that Alambda/AKs, the mid-IR extinction relative to AKs, decreases from diffuse to dense environments, which may be explained in terms of ineffective dust growth in dense regions. The mean extinction (relative to AKs) is calculated for the four IRAC bands as well, which exhibits a flat mid-IR extinction law, consistent with previous determinations for other regions. The extinction in the IRAC 4.5micron band is anomalously high, much higher than that of the other three IRAC bands. It cannot be explained in terms of CO and CO2 ices. The mid-IR extinction in the four IRAC bands have also been derived for four representative regions in the Coalsack Globule 2 which respectively exhibit strong ice absorption, moderate or weak ice absorption, and very weak or no ice absorption. The derived mid-IR extinction curves are all flat, with Alambda/AKs increasing with the decrease of the H2O ice absorption optical depth.Comment: 39 pages, 13 figures, accepted by Ap

    Search for Spin-Dependent Short-Range Force Using Optically Polarized 3^3He Gas

    Get PDF
    We propose a new method to detect short-range \textit{P-} and \textit{T-} violating interactions between nucleons, based on measuring the precession frequency shift of polarized 3^3He nuclei in the presence of an unpolarized mass. To maximize the sensitivity, a high-pressure 3^3He cell with thin glass windows (250 μm\rm\mu m) is used to minimize the distance between the mass and 3^3He. The magnetic field fluctuation is suppressed by using the 3^3He gas in a different region of the cell as a magnetometer. Systematic uncertainties from the magnetic properties of the mass are suppressed by flipping both the magnetic field and spin directions. Without any magnetic shielding, our result has already reached the sensitivity of the current best limit. With improvement in uniformity and stability of the field, we can further improve the sensitivity by two orders of magnitude over the force range from 10−4−10−210^{-4}-10^{-2} m

    Entropy in the NUT-Kerr-Newman Black Holes Due to an Arbitrary Spin Field

    Full text link
    Membrane method is used to compute the entropy of the NUT-Kerr-Newman black holes. It is found that even though the Euler characteristic is greater than two, the Bekenstein-Hawking area law is still satisfied. The formula S=χA/8S=\chi A/8 relating the entropy and the Euler characteristic becomes inapplicable for non-extreme four dimensional NUT-Kerr-Newman black holes

    On the Triality Theory for a Quartic Polynomial Optimization Problem

    Full text link
    This paper presents a detailed proof of the triality theorem for a class of fourth-order polynomial optimization problems. The method is based on linear algebra but it solves an open problem on the double-min duality left in 2003. Results show that the triality theory holds strongly in a tri-duality form if the primal problem and its canonical dual have the same dimension; otherwise, both the canonical min-max duality and the double-max duality still hold strongly, but the double-min duality holds weakly in a symmetrical form. Four numerical examples are presented to illustrate that this theory can be used to identify not only the global minimum, but also the largest local minimum and local maximum.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure; J. Industrial and Management Optimization, 2011. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1104.297
    • …
    corecore