490 research outputs found
Salt polygons and porous media convection
From fairy circles to patterned ground and columnar joints, natural patterns spontaneously appear in many complex geophysical settings. Here, we investigate the origins of polygonally patterned crusts of salt playa and salt pans. These beautifully regular features, approximately a meter in diameter, are found worldwide and are fundamentally important to the transport of salt and dust in arid regions. We show that they are consistent with the surface expression of buoyancy-driven convection in the porous soil beneath a salt crust. By combining quantitative results from direct field observations, analog experiments, and numerical simulations, we further determine the conditions under which salt polygons should form, as well as how their characteristic size emerges
Testing the performance of state-of-the-art dust emission schemes using DO4Models field data
Within the framework of the Dust Observations for Models (DO4Models) project, the performance of three commonly used dust emission schemes is investigated in this paper using a box model environment. We constrain the model with field data (surface and dust particle properties as well as meteorological parameters) obtained from a dry lake bed with a crusted surface in Botswana during a 3 month period in 2011. Our box model results suggest that all schemes fail to reproduce the observed horizontal dust flux. They overestimate the magnitude of the flux by several orders of magnitude. The discrepancy is much smaller for the vertical dust emission flux, albeit still overestimated by up to an order of magnitude. The key parameter for this mismatch is the surface crusting which limits the availability of erosive material, even at higher wind speeds. The second-most important parameter is the soil size distribution. Direct dust entrainment was inferred to be important for several dust events, which explains the smaller gap between modelled and measured vertical dust fluxes. We conclude that both features, crusted surfaces and direct entrainment, need to be incorporated into dust emission schemes in order to represent the entire spectra of source processes. We also conclude that soil moisture exerts a key control on the threshold shear velocity and hence the emission threshold of dust in the model. In the field, the state of the crust is the controlling mechanism for dust emission. Although the crust is related to the soil moisture content to some extent, we are not as yet able to deduce a robust correlation between state of crust and soil moisture
The Fundamental Plane at z=1.27: First Calibration of the Mass Scale of Red Galaxies at Redshifts z>1
We present results on the Fundamental Plane (FP) of early-type galaxies in
the cluster RDCS J0848+4453 at z=1.27. Internal velocity dispersions of three
K-selected early-type galaxies are determined from deep Keck spectra.
Structural parameters are determined from HST NICMOS images. The galaxies show
substantial offsets from the FP of the nearby Coma cluster, as expected from
passive evolution of their stellar populations. The offsets from the FP can be
expressed as offsets in M/L ratio. The M/L ratios of the two most massive
galaxies are consistent with an extrapolation of results obtained at
z=0.02-0.83. The evolution of early-type galaxies with masses >10^11 M_sun is
well described by ln M/L(B) = (-1.06 +- 0.09) z, corresponding to passive
evolution of -1.50 +- 0.13 mag at z=1.3. Ignoring selection effects, the best
fitting stellar formation redshift is z*=2.6, corresponding to a luminosity
weighted age at the epoch of observation of ~2 Gyr. The M/L ratios of these two
galaxies are also in excellent agreement with predictions from models that
include progenitor bias. The third galaxy is a factor ~10 less massive than the
other two, shows strong Balmer absorption lines in its spectrum, and is offset
from the Coma Fundamental Plane by 2.9 mag in rest-frame B. Despite their large
range in M/L ratios, all three galaxies fall in the ``Extremely Red Object''
(ERO) class with I-H>3 and R-K>5, and our results show that it is hazardous to
use simple models for converting luminosity to mass for these objects.
Measurements of M/L ratios at high redshift can be considered first steps to
empirically disentangle luminosity and mass evolution at the high mass end of
the galaxy population, lifting an important degeneracy in the interpretation of
evolution of the luminosity function. [SHORTENED]Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa
Field evidence for the upwind velocity shift at the crest of low dunes
Wind topographically forced by hills and sand dunes accelerates on the upwind
(stoss) slopes and reduces on the downwind (lee) slopes. This secondary wind
regime, however, possesses a subtle effect, reported here for the first time
from field measurements of near-surface wind velocity over a low dune: the wind
velocity close to the surface reaches its maximum upwind of the crest. Our
field-measured data show that this upwind phase shift of velocity with respect
to topography is found to be in quantitative agreement with the prediction of
hydrodynamical linear analysis for turbulent flows with first order closures.
This effect, together with sand transport spatial relaxation, is at the origin
of the mechanisms of dune initiation, instability and growth.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Version accepted for publication in
Boundary-Layer Meteorolog
Optical properties of the vibrations in charged C molecules
The transition strengths for the four infrared-active vibrations of charged
C molecules are evaluated in self-consistent density functional theory
using the local density approximation. The oscillator strengths for the second
and fourth modes are strongly enhanced relative to the neutral C
molecule, in good agreement with the experimental observation of ``giant
resonances'' for those two modes. Previous theory, based on a ``charged
phonon'' model, predicted a quadratic dependence of the oscillator strength on
doping, but this is not borne out in our calculations.Comment: 10 pages, RevTeX3.
WFPC2 Observations of the Hubble Deep Field-South
The Hubble Deep Field-South observations targeted a high-galactic-latitude
field near QSO J2233-606. We present WFPC2 observations of the field in four
wide bandpasses centered at roughly 300, 450, 606, and 814 nm. Observations,
data reduction procedures, and noise properties of the final images are
discussed in detail. A catalog of sources is presented, and the number counts
and color distributions of the galaxies are compared to a new catalog of the
HDF-N that has been constructed in an identical manner. The two fields are
qualitatively similar, with the galaxy number counts for the two fields
agreeing to within 20%. The HDF-S has more candidate Lyman-break galaxies at z
> 2 than the HDF-N. The star-formation rate per unit volume computed from the
HDF-S, based on the UV luminosity of high-redshift candidates, is a factor of
1.9 higher than from the HDF-N at z ~ 2.7, and a factor of 1.3 higher at z ~ 4.Comment: 93 pages, 25 figures; contains very long table
Plaskett's Star: Analysis of the CoRoT photometric data
The SRa02 of the CoRoT space mission for Asteroseismology was partly devoted
to stars belonging to the Mon OB2 association. An intense monitoring was
performed on Plaskett's Star (HD47129) and the unprecedented quality of the
light curve allows us to shed new light on this very massive, non-eclipsing
binary system. We particularly aimed at detecting periodic variability which
might be associated with pulsations or interactions between both components. We
also searched for variations related to the orbital cycle which could help to
constrain the inclination and the morphology of the binary system. A
Fourier-based prewhitening and a multiperiodic fitting procedure were applied
to analyse the time series and extract the frequencies of variations. We
describe the noise properties to tentatively define an appropriate significance
criterion, to only point out the peaks at a certain significance level. We also
detect the variations related to the orbital motion and study them by using the
NIGHTFALL program. The periodogram exhibits a majority of peaks at low
frequencies. Among these peaks, we highlight a list of about 43 values,
including notably two different sets of harmonic frequencies whose fundamental
peaks are located at about 0.07 and 0.82d-1. The former represents the orbital
frequency of the binary system whilst the latter could probably be associated
with non-radial pulsations. The study of the 0.07d-1 variations reveals the
presence of a hot spot most probably situated on the primary star and facing
the secondary. The investigation of this unique dataset constitutes a further
step in the understanding of Plaskett's Star. These results provide a first
basis for future seismic modelling. The existence of a hot region between both
components renders the determination of the inclination ambiguous.Comment: Accepted in A&A, 13 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
- …