4,484 research outputs found
Spectroscopic Binary Mass Determination using Relativity
High-precision radial-velocity techniques, which enabled the detection of
extrasolar planets are now sensitive to relativistic effects in the data of
spectroscopic binary stars (SBs). We show how these effects can be used to
derive the absolute masses of the components of eclipsing single-lined SBs and
double-lined SBs from Doppler measurements alone. High-precision stellar
spectroscopy can thus substantially increase the number of measured stellar
masses, thereby improving the mass-radius and mass-luminosity calibrations.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication by the Astrophysical
Journal Letter
2007 OARSI recommendations for the management of hip and knee osteoarthritis: towards consensus?
Quantitative chemical tagging, stellar ages and the chemo-dynamical evolution of the Galactic disc
The early science results from the new generation of high-resolution stellar
spectroscopic surveys, such as GALAH and the Gaia-ESO survey, will represent
major milestones in the quest to chemically tag the Galaxy. Yet this technique
to reconstruct dispersed coeval stellar groups has remained largely untested
until recently. We build on previous work that developed an empirical chemical
tagging probability function, which describes the likelihood that two field
stars are conatal, that is, they were formed in the same cluster environment.
In this work we perform the first ever blind chemical tagging experiment, i.e.,
tagging stars with no known or otherwise discernable associations, on a sample
of 714 disc field stars with a number of high quality high resolution
homogeneous metal abundance measurements. We present evidence that chemical
tagging of field stars does identify coeval groups of stars, yet these groups
may not represent distinct formation sites, e.g. as in dissolved open clusters,
as previously thought. Our results point to several important conclusions,
among them that group finding will be limited strictly to chemical abundance
space, e.g. stellar ages, kinematics, colors, temperature and surface gravity
do not enhance the detectability of groups. We also demonstrate that in
addition to its role in probing the chemical enrichment and kinematic history
of the Galactic disc, chemical tagging represents a powerful new stellar age
determination technique.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of
the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS
Correcting systematic effects in a large set of photometric light curves
We suggest a new algorithm to remove systematic effects in a large set of light curves obtained by a photometric survey. The algorithm can remove systematic effects, such as those associated with atmospheric extinction, detector efficiency, or point spread function changes over the detector. The algorithm works without any prior knowledge of the effects, as long as they linearly appear in many stars of the sample. The approach, which was originally developed to remove atmospheric extinction effects, is based on a lower rank approximation of matrices, an approach which has already been suggested and used in chemometrics, for example. The proposed algorithm is especially useful in cases where the uncertainties of the measurements are unequal. For equal uncertainties, the algorithm reduces to the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) algorithm. We present a simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and we point out its potential, in the search for transit candidates in particula
TIRAVEL - Template Independent RAdial VELocity measurement
We propose a new approach to measure differential radial velocities, mainly
for single-lined spectroscopic binaries. The proposed procedure - TIRAVEL
(Template Independent RAdial VELocities) - does not rely on a prior theoretical
or observed template, but instead looks for a set of relative Doppler shifts
that simultaneously optimizes the alignment of all the observed spectra. We
suggest a simple measure to quantify this overall alignment and use its maximum
to measure the relative radial velocities. As a demonstration, we apply TIRAVEL
to the observed spectra of three known spectroscopic binaries, and show that in
two cases TIRAVEL performs as good as the commonly used approach, while in one
case TIRAVEL yielded a better orbital solution.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figures, to be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Societ
Supersymmetric Brane World Scenarios from Off-Shell Supergravity
Using N=2 off-shell supergravity in five dimensions, we supersymmetrize the
brane world scenario of Randall and Sundrum. We extend their construction to
include supersymmetric matter at the fixpoints.Comment: 15 pages, no figures, late
Universal contributions to scalar masses from five dimensional supergravity
We compute the effective Kahler potential for matter fields in warped
compactifications, starting from five dimensional gauged supergravity, as a
function of the matter fields localization. We show that truncation to zero
modes is inconsistent and the tree-level exchange of the massive gravitational
multiplet is needed for consistency of the four-dimensional theory. In addition
to the standard Kahler coming from dimensional reduction, we find the quartic
correction coming from integrating out the gravity multiplet. We apply our
result to the computation of scalar masses, by assuming that the SUSY breaking
field is a bulk hypermultiplet. In the limit of extreme opposite localization
of the matter and the spurion fields, we find zero scalar masses, consistent
with sequestering arguments. Surprisingly enough, for all the other cases the
scalar masses are tachyonic. This suggests the holographic interpretation that
a CFT sector always generates operators contributing in a tachyonic way to
scalar masses. Viability of warped su- persymmetric compactifications
necessarily asks then for additional contributions. We discuss the case of
additional bulk vector multiplets with mixed boundary conditions, which is a
partic- ularly simple and attractive way to generate large positive scalar
masses. We show that in this case successful fermion mass matrices implies
highly degenerate scalar masses for the first two generations of squarks and
sleptons.Comment: 23 pages. v2: References added, new section on effect of additional
bulk vector multiplets and phenomenolog
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