An Attempt to Detect the Galactic Bulge at 12 microns with IRAS

Surface brightness maps at 12 microns, derived from observations with the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), are used to estimate the integrated flux at this wavelength from the Galactic bulge as a function of galactic latitude along the minor axis. A simple model was used to remove Galactic disk emission (e.g. unresolved stars and dust) from the IRAS measurements. The resulting estimates are compared with predictions for the 12 micron bulge surface brightness based on observations of complete samples of optically identified M giants in several minor axis bulge fields. No evidence is found for any significant component of 12m emission in the bulge other than that expected from the optically identified M star sample plus normal, lower luminosity stars. Known large amplitude variables and point sources from the IRAS catalogue contribute only a small fraction to the total 12 micron flux.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 13 pages of text including tables in MS WORD97 generated postscript; 3 figures in postscript by Sigma Plo

OH-selected AGB and post-AGB objects I.Infrared and maser properties

Using 766 compact objects from a survey of the galactic Plane in the 1612-MHz OH line, new light is cast on the infrared properties of evolved stars on the TP-AGB and beyond. The usual mid-infrared selection criteria, based on IRAS colours, largely fail to distinguish early post-AGB stages. A two-colour diagram from narrower-band MSX flux densities, with bimodal distributions, provides a better tool to do the latter. Four mutually consistent selection criteria for OH-masing red PPNe are given, as well as two for early post-AGB masers and one for all post--AGB masers, including the earliest ones. All these criteria miss a group of blue, high-outflow post-AGB sources with 60-mum excess; these will be discussed in detail in Paper II. The majority of post-AGB sources show regular double-peaked spectra in the OH 1612-MHz line, with fairly low outflow velocities, although the fractions of single peaks and irregular spectra may vary with age and mass. The OH flux density shows a fairly regular relation with the stellar flux and the envelope optical depth, with the maser efficiency increasing with IRAS colour R21. The OH flux density is linearly correlated with the 60-mum flux density.Comment: 16 pages, LaTex, 22 figures, AJ (accepted

Continuous-flow IRMS technique for determining the 17O excess of CO2 using complete oxygen isotope exchange with cerium oxide

This paper presents an analytical system for analysis of all single substituted isotopologues (¹²C¹⁶O¹⁷O, ¹²C¹⁶O¹⁸O, ¹³C¹⁶O¹⁶O) in nanomolar quantities of CO₂ extracted from stratospheric air samples. CO₂ is separated from bulk air by gas chromatography and CO₂ isotope ratio measurements (ion masses 45 / 44 and 46 / 44) are performed using isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS). The ¹⁷O excess (Δ¹⁷O) is derived from isotope measurements on two different CO₂ aliquots: unmodified CO₂ and CO₂ after complete oxygen isotope exchange with cerium oxide (CeO₂) at 700 °C. Thus, a single measurement of Δ¹⁷O requires two injections of 1 mL of air with a CO₂ mole fraction of 390 μmol mol⁻¹ at 293 K and 1 bar pressure (corresponding to 16 nmol CO₂ each). The required sample size (including flushing) is 2.7 mL of air. A single analysis (one pair of injections) takes 15 minutes. The analytical system is fully automated for unattended measurements over several days. The standard deviation of the ¹⁷O excess analysis is 1.7‰. Multiple measurements on an air sample reduce the measurement uncertainty, as expected for the statistical standard error. Thus, the uncertainty for a group of 10 measurements is 0.58‰ for Δ ¹⁷O in 2.5 h of analysis. 100 repeat analyses of one air sample decrease the standard error to 0.20‰. The instrument performance was demonstrated by measuring CO₂ on stratospheric air samples obtained during the EU project RECONCILE with the high-altitude aircraft Geophysica. The precision for RECONCILE data is 0.03‰ (1σ) for δ¹³C, 0.07‰ (1σ) for δ¹⁸O and 0.55‰ (1σ) for δ¹⁷O for a sample of 10 measurements. This is sufficient to examine stratospheric enrichments, which at altitude 33 km go up to 12‰ for δ¹⁷O and up to 8‰ for δ¹⁸O with respect to tropospheric CO₂ : δ¹⁷O ~ 21‰ Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water (VSMOW), δ¹⁸O ~ 41‰ VSMOW (Lämmerzahl et al., 2002). The samples measured with our analytical technique agree with available data for stratospheric CO₂

Low-complexity algorithms for sequencing jobs with a fixed number of job-classes

In this paper we consider the problem of scheduling n jobs such that makespan is minimized. It is assumed that the jobs can be divided into K job-classes and that the change-over time between two consecutive jobs depends on the job-classes to which the two jobs belong. In this setting, we discuss the one machine scheduling problem with arbitrary processing times and the parallel machines scheduling problem with identical processing times. In both cases it is assumed that the number of job-classes K is fixed. By using an appropriate integer programming formulation with a fixed number of variables and constraints, it is shown that these two problems are solvable in polynomial time. For the one machine scheduling case it is shown that the complexity of our algorithm is linear in the number of jobs n. Moreover, if the problem is encoded according to the high multiplicity model of Hochbaum and Shamir, the time complexity of the algorithm is shown to be a polynomial in log n. In the parallel machine scheduling case, it is shown that if the number of machines is fixed the same results hold. Copyrigh