Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Preprints

Afshordi et al. stack 193 X-ray emitting clusters to find a 9 sigma detection of the SZ effect in the WMAP 3-year data. They find that 32+/-10% of the baryons are not in the hot ICM.

Cattaneo & Treyssier perform detailed simulations of AGN feedback on cluster ICM and show that after an initial rapid accretion phase a stable solution is reached with a constant small accretion rate.

Hashimoto et al. analyze a sample of Chandra images of clusters using simple statistics to define morphology. They find that distorted and non-distorted clusters occupy different loci in the L-T plane but no correlation between morphology and luminosity or temperature.

Crowder & Cornish present their solution to the "cocktail party" problem of LISA analysis of Galactic binaries using a Blocked Annealing Metropolis-Hastings MCMC.

Riess et al. present new SNIa, 13 of which are at z>1, and conclude that the data are still consistent with w=-1 and rule out dw/dz>>1.

Borkin et al. use medical imaging technology for slicing 3D data cubes in an astronomical context as part of the Harvard AstroMed initiative.

Fusco-Femiano et al. argue that there really is a non-thermal excess from the Coma cluster.

Jonsson et al. calculate the effects of weak lensing on possible attempts to do cosmology useing GW detections of chirping black holes with EM counterparts (hence redshifts).

Nayakshin explains the variability of continuum and constancy of reflection components in AGN by arguing that disk coronal flares are likely to emit anisotropically.

Preprints

McHardy et al. argue on the basis of X-ray variability and optical emission line widths that AGN are just scaled-up galactic binaries in terms of their black hole accretion process.

Schaefer constructs a Hubble diagram from 69 GRBs and argues that it provides an accuracy only a factor of 2 worse than the big SNIa surveys.

Boyarsky et al. note that improved limits on the sterile neutrino can be obtained using a wide-field but low effective area (ie no telescope) calorimeter.

Ravikumar et al. present new redshifts of objects in the CDFS (alias GOODS-South) and note that this field contains anomalous structures containing evolved, massive galaxies.

Barack & Cutler investigate how well LISA observations of EMRIs can test that spacetime around a rotating BH is the Kerr metric.

Wise et al. report on a deep Chandra observation of Hydra A which shows extensive cavities which correlate precisely with 330 MHz emission.

Belczynski et al. argue that the creation of stellar mass BH binaries are suppressed by mergers during the common envelope phase and so these are not likely to be a significant population for advanced LIGO.

Andersson et al. use their new Smoothed Particle Inference technique to derive temperature maps of three clusters observed using XMM.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Preprints

Gogus et al. point out that supposing Compton scattering dilutes the NS rotation signature in LMXBs also predicts a hard tail from upscattering of NS surface soft photons and this is not seen.

In the first of a series of papers Young & Fryer look at the uncertainties in element yields from SN explosion models.

Lin & Mohr survey radio sources in 573 clusters using data from the NVSS and note that as many as 10% of clusters may have 150 GHz fluxes from AGN comparable to the SZ signal.

Kashlinsky et al. extend their P(D) analysis of Spitzer data to the GOODS dataset and find further evidence for extragalactic fluctuations. In another paper they also discuss the nature of the sources.

Finoguenov et al. report on cluster detections in the first 36 pointings of the XMM-COSMOS survey.

Hayashi et al. simulate the cores of galaxy-sized dark matter haloes and find that the ellipticity increases towards the center. This may explain the observed flattening of velocity profiles in LSB galaxies.

Hopman et al. estimate the expected LISA signal from GW bursts caused by stars in close orbits with the Galactic Center BH.

Jetha et al. study 15 groups with Chandra and find no significant differences in gas profiles between those with radio-loud and radio-quiet BCGs.

Begelman & Pringle consider accretion disks with toroidal magnetic fields and find they are thicker than standard disks for the same radius and accretion rate and have a higher color temperature.

kerrbb model

Jeff McClintock writes :

Some users of kerrbb have been freezing the inclination (par3), the mass(par4), and the distance (par6) and then allowing the normalization constant K to vary. This is not correct: with i, M and D fixed, the normalization should be frozen at K = 1. The current instructions for running kerrbb, which we provided to you, are not clear on this point. When it is convenient, please change the last line of the description of kerrbb to read something like the following:

K =normalization. Should be set to 1 if the inclination, mass and distance are frozen.

We have made this change in the v11 and v12 documentation.

Keywords: HEAsoft, xspec

Friday, December 22, 2006

extractor and lightcurve files

The lightcurve file output from extractor did not necessarily include an extension named GTI as required by the standard. Now modified to add such a GTI extension. If there are multiple CCDs and hence gti extensions then individual extensions are still written but a GTI extension is also written containing the merged gtis. v4.72.

Note that this also fixes a bug in xselect when using select intensity on XMM data - the problem was that the new select intensity perl script assumes the presence of an extension called GTI in the lightcurve.

Keywords : HEAsoft, xselect, extractor

Monday, December 18, 2006

onepar bug

The wftbmd.f file in the onepar routine for creating single parameter table models does not initialize the status variable. This can lead to a spurious error message and program exit.

Keywords: HEAsoft, xspec