Preprints

Boehringer et al. find a massive cooling flow cluster RXCJ1504.1-0248 with a central giant elliptical hosting a known radio source.

Pope et al. investigate the effects of thermal conduction on the ICM using a 3-d model of the Virgo cluster. They find little effect for any physically reasonable values of the conduction.

Finoguenov et al. study the 2-D structure of the nearly volume- limited subset of REFLEX clusters at z~0.3.

Glazebrook et al. summarize a proposed Gemini/Subaru wide field redshift survey with the goal of measuring the baryon oscillations using 2.6 million galaxies.

Warren et al. present evidence from Chandra that cosmic ray acceleration is occurring at the Tycho forward shock.

Bocchino et al. argue that G21.5 X-ray halo can be described as dust scattering from the plerion, particle acceleration in the fast forward shock, and a bright spot which may be ejecta in adiabatic expansion.

marfrmf

Added an arfcol hidden parameter option to allow the user to specify a column other than SPECRESP from which to read the ARF data. This increases flexibility and may be useful for Suzaku if we end up creating ARF files with an individual column for each pixel.

Keywords: heasoft, suzaku

Suzaku and xselect

Added a SUZAKU mission to xselect.mdb. Also switched catnum from 0 to 1 since the primary header doesn't appear to contain the descriptive keywords.

Set ccol to PIXEL to ensure that DSS keywords are updated when region filtering. Note that this requires the input event files to have the DSS keywords for PIXEL set up with one keyword per pixel eg DSTYP1='PIXEL', DSVAL1='0:0', 2DSVAL1='1:1',...,32DSVAL1='31:31'. Only one time DSS keyword set is required however (DSTYP2='TIME', DSVAL2='TABLE', DSREF2=':GTI') unless at some point we require separate GTI extensions for each pixel.

With these changes it is now possible to select pixels either by FILTER COLUMN with the argument eg PIXEL=0:5 10:12 or by the standard region filtering which will include all pixels with an events included in the (X,Y) region.

Keywords : heasoft, xselect, Suzaku

Plotting more than 15 spectra in xspec

Steve Snowden pointed out that with > 15 spectra read in then spectrum 16 and above are not plotted. This occurs because PGPLOT only defines 15 colours so PLT commands of the form
COLOR 16 ON N generate a black line on black background. The fix is to cycle round the colours
so spectrum 16 is plotted with colour 1 and so on. This is 11.3.2l and will appear shortly as a patch to v12.

Keywords: heasoft, xspec

xselect/extractor region rotation angles

Fixed inconsistency between rotation angle defined in ds9 ELLIPSE and BOX regions and their use in extractor. It appears that extractor was treating these angles as clockwise from the x-axis while ds9 defines the angles as counter-clockwise from the same axis. This fix is extractor v4.55 (14 Jul 2005).

Cstat

Pat Broos reported a discontinuity in Cstat when running under Solaris with a very weak source and background. Craig spotted this as round-off error when solving the quadratic in the case where b^2 >> ac. Fixed this using the algorithm from NR. Also explicitly handled the special cases of zero source or background counts in a channel. I don't think this latter changed any results.

Note that in the very weak source limit Cstat appears to exhibit bias in some circumstances ie the best fit does not appear to be correct when doing a plot icounts. Cstat with background is a profile likelihood which is well known in the statistics literature to exhibit bias in the low sample limit. A practical partial solution appears to be to run grppha with group min 1 to ensure that every bin has at least one count. The statistics literature does offer corrections to the profile likelihood but these appear to be algebraically very complex in this case.

Preprints

Kleyna et al. estimate the mass of the newly discovered extremely low luminosity Ursa Major dwarf spheroidal and find central M/L ~ 500. They theorize that this could be an example of the missing low mass haloes that standard cosmology predicts should surround our Galaxy.

Frontera et al. review the prospects for imaging in the 60-600 keV band using Laue lenses.

Ebisawa et al. present the results of a deep Chandra observation of the Galactic plane with follow-up IR imaging. They also study the spectrum of the diffuse X-ray emission.

Preprints

Lehmer et al. present sources in the CDFS flanking fields.

Alexander et al. show that 75% of the SCUBA sources in the CDFN harbor AGN.

Kino & Kawakatu use the cocoon to estimate the kinetic power and age of Cygnus-A.

Famaey & Binney argue that inner Milky Way dynamics excludes Bekenstein's covariant gravity formulation of MOND.

Haiman et al. describe using a 100,000 cluster X-ray survey to place constraints on Dark Energy.

Canizares et al. describe the Chandra HETG and its in-flight performance.

Heinz & Churazov argue that bubbles of relativistic gas in the ICM act as catalysts converting sound and shock waves to heat.

Crotts et al. present a white paper proposal for JEDI, a 2m space telescope with wide-field imaging and multi-slit spectroscopy capable of doing SNIa, baryon oscillation, and weak lensing studies.

Vikhlinin et al. analyze Chandra data on 13 nearby clusters and derive temperature and density profiles out to large radii. f_gas profiles don't reach Universal values till r > r_2500.

Repeated WENV in PLT

Allyn Tennant supplied a fix to a problem noted by Tahir Yaqoob that repeated use of WENV in PLT ended up producing a message about exceeding the available unit numbers.

Note that headas has too copies of qdp & plt, one under ftools and the other under Xspec/plot. I don't think this duplication is necessary. The ftools copy is two years and the Xspec copy is four years out-of-date.

Allyn now has a QDP/PLT webpage with the latest version available by ftp.

kerrbb

The Jan 05 fix to the kerrbb new model didn't make it into the recent release. Fixed this as
11.3.2j and will also appear shortly as a v12 patch.

Preprints

Wyithe & Loeb argue that SMBH growth rate is determined by the spheroid velocity dispersion, not the mass.

Cornish & Crowder test MCMC methods for LISA data analysis.

Bertolami & Vieira test various models of the Kuiper belt to see whether they can explain the Pioneer Anomaly. None work however they note that any mission to test the anomaly will also be a useful probe of the mass distribution in the belt.

McKernan et al. place limits on ionic column densities of Galactic halo hot gas using Chandra grating spectral observations of 15 type I AGN.

Tagliaferri et al. summarize the prompt X-ray emission lightcurve from Swift bursts.

Dupke & Bregman survey constraints on bulk motions in clusters based on ASCA spectra.

Read et al. describe progress towards the XMM slew-survey which will cover the sky at 2-10 keV ten times deeper than all other surveys in this energy range.

Vaughan & Uttley consider what is required to detect QPOs from AGN and conclude that the most efficient technique requires and all-sky version of the RXTE ASM.

wtmapfix in extractor

Lorella pointed out a problem with the Swift/XRT data in xselect. The WMAPs do not have -1 in pixels outside the selected region despite having wtmapfix set to yes. The problem arises because the XRT uses the same coordinate system for image and WMAP and extractor automatically resets wtmapfix to no in this case. I fixed this so that in this case the WMAP fix to convert the region from image to wmap coordinates is not done however pixels outside the region are still set to -1.

Keywords: heasoft, extractor, Swift

Speed-up of NEI APEC models

After I added the thermal and velocity-broadening the NEI APEC models slowed down even when there was no broadening in use. I fixed this to some extent by trapping lines that fall completely outside the response energy range at an earlier point in the code.

Keywords: heasoft, xspec

Preprints

Perryman et al. review the prospects for detection of extrasolar planets.

Jane Turner et al. analyze XMM data of Mrk766 looking in the energy-time plane for evidence of orbital motion around the SMBH.

gaussline function

Added a trap for zero width to the start of the gaussline function in xsgaul.f. This should be speed up the code and also fixes an occasional seg fault. Checked into the cvs depository for both v11 and v12 but not made public. I'm waiting for Frank Haberl to get back to me on a problem he has had with the gaussian model that I can't replicate locally.

Keywords: heasoft, xspec

NEI models

Terry Gaetz spotted that the NEI models don't respond to the abund command and always use Anders & Grevesse relative abundances. Fixed as 11.3.2h. Will also go out as a v12 patch.

Keywords: heasoft, xspec

nsa model

George Pavlov passed along some changes to the documentation for this nsa model. The references were only for non-magnetic models. Modified xspec.hlp but didn't put out as a patch.

Keywords: heasoft, xspec

Preprints

Udalski et al. (the OGLE team) find a second case of a Jupiter mass planet using gravitational microlensing.

Thomas et al. consider the effects of GRBs on the Earth and in particular whether a nearby GRB could be an initiator of a mass extinction event.

Ensslin & Vogt develop an analytic model for magnetic turbulence in cool cores of clusters.

Brighenti & Matthews suggest that a fraction of the Fe from SNI in early-type galaxies could rapidly radiatively cool and hence not be measured using X-ray observations.

Glazebrook & Blake calculate the sensitivities of very large redshift surveys to measure the baryon oscillations and hence determine the evolution of dark energy.

Pilla et al. describe a score test for distinguishing a new source from a random fluctuation.

Young et al. analyze a 522 ksec Chandra HETG observation of MCG-6-30-15 and conclude that the spectrum is consistent with a broad relativistic line round a fast rotating SMBH.

tclout simpars seg fault

Piero Ranalli reported getting seg faults under Linux when running tclout simpars. Turned out to be an error assigning a string size. Fixed as 11.3.2g.

Keywords: heasoft, xspec

xselect HXD

According to Terada-san the HXD instrument name should be changed from HXD to HXD-WELL. Also the WMAP will be created as UNITID vs. PIN_ID. Check in appropriate changes to xselect.mdb.

Keywords: xselect, Astro-E2