The core size of the Fornax dwarf Spheroidal

We exploit the detection of three distinct stellar subpopulations in the red giant branch of the Fornax dwarf Spheroidal to probe its density distribution. This allows us to resolve directly the evolution with radius of the dark matter mass profile. We find that a cored dark matter halo provides a perfect fit to the data, being consistent with all three stellar populations well within 1-sigma, and for the first time we are able to put constraints on the core size of such a halo. With respect to previous work, we do not strengthen the statistical exclusion of a dark matter cusp in Fornax, but we find that Navarro-Frenk-White haloes would be required to have unrealistically large scale radii in order to be compatible with the data, hence low values of the concentration parameter. We are then forced to conclude that the Fornax dwarf Spheroidal sits within a dark matter halo having a constant density core, with a core size of between 0.6 and 1.8 kpc.Comment: MNRAS Letters, submitte

Hamiltonians of Spherically Symmetric, Scale-Free Galaxies in Action-Angle Coordinates

We present a simple formula for the Hamiltonian in terms of the actions for spherically symmetric, scale-free potentials. The Hamiltonian is a power-law or logarithmic function of a linear combination of the actions. Our expression reduces to the well-known results for the familiar cases of the harmonic oscillator and the Kepler potential. For other power-laws, as well as for the singular isothermal sphere, it is exact for the radial and circular orbits, and very accurate for general orbits. Numerical tests show that the errors are always small, with mean errors across a grid of actions always less than 1 % and maximum errors less than 2.5 %. Simple first-order corrections can reduce mean errors to less than 0.6 % and maximum errors to less than 1 %. We use our new result to show that :[1] the misalignment angle between debris in a stream and a progenitor is always very nearly zero in spherical scale-free potentials, demonstrating that streams can be sometimes well approximated by orbits, [2] the effects of an adiabatic change in the stellar density profile in the inner regions of a galaxy weaken any existing 1/r density cusp, which is reduced to $1/r^{1/3}$. More generally, we derive the full range of adiabatic cusp transformations and show how to relate the starting cusp index to the final cusp index. It follows that adiabatic transformations can never erase a dark matter cusp.Comment: 6 pages, MNRAS, in pres

A review of the Yorkshire and Humber regional waste strategy

Managing waste has become a primary issue for regional planners. This article reports on the institutional process underpinning the region’s strategy and the stages in its production. It emphasises that there has been a watering down of the target for household waste production without appropriate explanation

Ubiquity of synonymity: almost all large binary trees are not uniquely identified by their spectra or their immanantal polynomials

There are several common ways to encode a tree as a matrix, such as the adjacency matrix, the Laplacian matrix (that is, the infinitesimal generator of the natural random walk), and the matrix of pairwise distances between leaves. Such representations involve a specific labeling of the vertices or at least the leaves, and so it is natural to attempt to identify trees by some feature of the associated matrices that is invariant under relabeling. An obvious candidate is the spectrum of eigenvalues (or, equivalently, the characteristic polynomial). We show for any of these choices of matrix that the fraction of binary trees with a unique spectrum goes to zero as the number of leaves goes to infinity. We investigate the rate of convergence of the above fraction to zero using numerical methods. For the adjacency and Laplacian matrices, we show that that the {\em a priori} more informative immanantal polynomials have no greater power to distinguish between trees