The Luminosity Function and Density Distribution of Disk Population Stars

The density distribution and luminosity function of the disk population are investigated, using star counts as a function of V and B-V for several thousand stars near the North Galactic Pole. Having estimated the contributions to the counts due to Population II stars and disk giants and subgiants, the remaining stars are assumed to constitute a pure disk-dwarf population. Density distributions for stars in successive (B-V)_0 intervals are calculated and combined to form a composite disk density distribution. The agreement with Oort’s K-giant distribution is satisfactory. There is evidence that dwarfs redder than (B-V)_0=1.4 are concentrated in a narrow layer in the plane, similar to the interstellar gas. Determination of the luminosity function for the reddest disk dwarfs indicates these stars are five to ten times as numerous as was previously thought, thus accounting for a significant fraction of the missing mass in the solar neighborhood. The luminosity function is extrapolated to estimate the contribution to the missing mass of main sequence stars fainter than those considered in the analysis

The Effects of Winning a Basketball National Championship on Admission Factors

Collegiate sports attract a lot of attention and money. Many universities are sponsored by high powered sportswear and equipment companies including Nike and Adidas. Furthermore, CBS, Fox, and Disney participate in multimillion dollar media deals to exclusively cover a variety of sporting events featuring mainly collegiate basketball and football. This is best demonstrated by the television coverage that respective sports receive. For example, CBS is in the midst of an 11 year, $6 billion contract that will pay the National Collegiate Athletic Association approximately$545 million per year to carry the NCAA basketball tournament. The NCAA basketball tournament is held annually and decides the collegiate basketball national champion through a 65 team, single elimination tournament. The tournament is also known as March Madness and has a widespread age following. Many companies have office pools where participants fill out a bracket with their winning picks for each and every game. However, the participation in pools is not exclusive to workers. Many students in high school and college participate in pools as well. On ESPN.com alone, there are over 5 million people who filled out brackets. In addition, other websites offer similar opportunities to fill out brackets including Sports Illustrated’s website, CBS’s website, and Yahoo.com to mention a few. Many participants also print out brackets. The participation in pools increases sustained interest in the tournament because people are invested in their brackets and wish to follow how their picks fair. In addition to college basketball, college football also possesses a very large following. To reach that audience, Disney acquired the rights to air the Bowl Championship Series in 2011 at the cost of $125 million a year. The Bowl Championship Series is currently made up of the Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl and the BCS National Championship Game. Previously, there was no specific BCS Championship game. Rather, the championship rotated between one of the four aforementioned bowls. The 2006 season was the first to institute the additional championship game. Despite the widespread attention that collegiate sports receive and the apparent money derived from athletic programs, athletic programs are a losing proposition for most schools. In addition, many universities use lax admission standards on athletes and shower them with full scholarships and other benefits that a normal qualified applicant would never receive. Nevertheless, athletic programs have a long standing tradition as being part of a successful university. The immaterial monetary significance of athletic programs questions the merits of maintaining athletic programs. Some schools have even cut losing and expensive programs to refocus their efforts and capital on academic pursuits. On the other hand, many universities accept losses to maintain their athletic programs. While a financially independent and profitable athletic program may be one of the goals of maintaining a program, another prominent goal is to have a successful program. A successful team acts as marketing for the university, especially if it is in a major sport (basketball and football) where there is a lot of national exposure. Intuitively, a large amount of exposure would increase the interest in the university, which would encourage more students to apply. This phenomenon is known as the “Flutie effect” which refers to Boston College’s Doug Flutie whose miraculous Hail Mary pass in the closing seconds of a 1984 game against the University of Miami secured the victory for Boston College. The following two years saw application increases of 16% and 12% respectively for Boston College. Long term impacts of the “Flutie effect” are not conclusively known or agreed upon. One of the first studies to compare collegiate athletic success and undergraduate admissions was Toma and Cross (1998). The study focused on football and men’s basketball national champions between 1979 and 1992 and the effects that the championship had on applications. The study compared the university that won the championship to four or five peer institutions—schools that the universities themselves thought as their main competitors. The study found that a championship in either men’s basketball or football translated into sometimes dramatic increase in the number of application received in absolute terms and when compared to peer institutions. Other studies examine similar topics. Irvin Tucker (2004) found that a successful big-time football team contributes to academics through attracting a higher quality incoming freshman class, improved graduation rates, and alumni giving. Conversely, a later paper by Tucker and Ted Amato (2006) finds that successful basketball team does not affect average SAT scores for applicants. Another study by Litan, Orszag, and Orszag (2003), which was commissioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) found that the “Flutie effect” has no foundational empirical support. In addition, it found that expanded athletic programs do not contribute to substantial financial losses. As seen in Litan, Orszag, and Orszag’s study as well as other academic articles have found no empirical evidence of the “Flutie effect.” However, there has been increased interest in collegiate sports, especially basketball and football. This is evident by the expanded television coverage of major conferences, extra season games, new bowl games for football, conference playoff games, and the BCS series. These new additions to the collegiate athletic landscape would not have been taken into account in older studies that focused on decades old data. Revisiting these studies with more recent data will alleviate that weakness and return results that more reflect the current environment of collegiate sports and admissions. This study will examine the effects of winning a national championship in football and men’s basketball on admission factors including applications, enrollment, SAT scores, and a variety of other factors. Data from 2001 through 2007 will be used to study the effects, a time range where most of the changes in the collegiate sports landscape had been put into place. This will address an important weakness in past studies

Reduction and analysis of VLA maps for 281 radio-loud quasars using the UNLV Cray Y-MP supercomputer

The identification of distorted radio-loud quasars provides a potentially very powerful tool for basic cosmological studies. If large morphological distortions are correlated with membership of the quasars in rich clusters of galaxies, optical observations can be used to identify rich clusters of galaxies at large redshifts. Hintzen, Ulvestad, and Owen (1983, HUO) undertook a VLA A array snapshot survey at 20 cm of 123 radio-loud quasars, and they found that among triple sources in their sample, 17 percent had radio axes which were bent more than 20 deg and 5 percent were bent more than 40 deg. Their subsequent optical observations showed that excess galaxy densities within 30 arcsec of 6 low-redshift distorted quasars were on average 3 times as great as those around undistorted quasars (Hintzen 1984). At least one of the distorted quasars observed, 3C275.1, apparently lies in the first-ranked galaxy at the center of a rich cluster of galaxies (Hintzen and Romanishin, 1986). Although their sample was small, these results indicated that observations of distorted quasars could be used to identify clusters of galaxies at large redshifts. The purpose of this project is to increase the available sample of distorted quasars to allow optical detection of a significant sample of quasar-associated clusters of galaxies at large redshifts

Equivalent Width of Hα in Late-Type Stars

The use of the equivalent width of Ha as a luminosity criterion for late-type stars is investigated. The method is found to be no more accurate than MK luminosity classifications. Two spectrograms are presented which indicate a change in the Ha equivalent width in 22 Vul over a three-year period

The Luminosity Function and Density Distribution of Disk Population Stars

The density distribution and luminosity function of the disk population are investigated, using star counts as a function of V and B-V for several thousand stars near the North Galactic Pole. Having estimated the contributions to the counts due to Population II stars and disk giants and subgiants, the remaining stars are assumed to constitute a pure disk-dwarf population. Density distributions for stars in successive (B-V)_0 intervals are calculated and combined to form a composite disk density distribution. The agreement with Oort’s K-giant distribution is satisfactory. There is evidence that dwarfs redder than (B-V)_0=1.4 are concentrated in a narrow layer in the plane, similar to the interstellar gas. Determination of the luminosity function for the reddest disk dwarfs indicates these stars are five to ten times as numerous as was previously thought, thus accounting for a significant fraction of the missing mass in the solar neighborhood. The luminosity function is extrapolated to estimate the contribution to the missing mass of main sequence stars fainter than those considered in the analysis

Luminosities of H alpha emitting regions in a pair of interacting galaxies in the Bootes void

Luminosities of H alpha emission from a pair of interacting galaxies in the low density environment of the Bootes void are presented. CG 692 (IRAS 1519+5050) has an H alpha luminosity of 2 x 10(exp 42) ergs s(exp -1), indicating a star formation rate of 18.4 solar mass yr(exp -1). Individual extranuclear H alpha regions have luminosities of approximately 10(exp 40) ergs s(exp -1). These luminosities are similar to those found for H II regions in bright, late-type galaxies in more densely populated parts of the Universe

Spatially resolved spectra of 3C galaxy nuclei

We present and discuss visible-wavelength long-slit spectra of four low redshift 3C galaxies obtained with the STIS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. The slit was aligned with near-nuclear jet-like structure seen in HST images of the galaxies, to give unprecedented spatial resolution of the galaxy inner regions. In 3C 135 and 3C 171, the spectra reveal clumpy emission line structures that indicate outward motions of a few hundred km s$^{-1}$ within a centrally illuminated and ionised biconical region. There may also be some low-ionisation high-velocity material associated with 3C 135. In 3C 264 and 3C 78, the jets have blue featureless spectra consistent with their proposed synchrotron origin. There is weak associated line emission in the innermost part of the jets with mild outflow velocity. These jets are bright and highly collimated only within a circumnuclear region of lower galaxy luminosity, which is not dusty. We discuss the origins of these central regions and their connection with relativistic jets.Comment: 15 pages incl Tables, 12 diagrams, To appear in A

Uncle Jesse and the seven “early career” ladies of the night

Jesse Leonard Greenstein (1909–2002) was apparently a very hard sell when it came to women in astronomy. Early in his autobiography, he wrote of “Miss Payne, a person of wide culture and astronomical knowledge. The obvious discrimination against her as a woman scientist, worthy of normal academic recognition, exacerbated the stressful life she led. She was unhappy, emotional, in a rivalry with Menzel and Plaskett.” She (a.k.a. Cecilia Helena Payne, later Gaposchkin) is the only woman with an explicit mention in that memoir, and Greenstein's impression of her left him uncertain whether women belonged in astronomy. In addition, some of us remember him as saying there was no use in educating women through to a Ph.D. because they only get married and quit