gfortran/g95 and xspec

A few changes to run under the new gfortran (with gcc 4). In grad.f replace IMAG function with AIMAG. This should make no difference and AIMAG is the f90 standard. In calcml.f make sure that both arguments to SIGN are double precision.

Keywords: xspec, g95

long log filenames in xspec v11

Jeremy Sanders reported hitting occasional seg faults when using long log filenames. He traced this to an 80 char fixed length string in tcllog.c. I've increased this to 1024 chars. v11.3.2n.

Keywords: xspec

cleansis

Cleansis assumes that chips are square. However, the individual segments in the XIS are rectangular (4x as long in the RAWY direction as RAWX). So I modified cleansis to use internal image arrays set by the maximum of the RAWX and RAWY sizes. This is slightly inefficient use of memory but much easier than changing the program to use non-square internal images.

Keywords: heasoft, Suzaku, XIS

Preprints

Adami et al. identify 17 groups in the Coma cluster by combining X-ray and galaxy redshift information.

Wittman et al. present first results from their cluster survey based on weak lensing.

Peterson et al. propose a new inference method for the ICM describing clusters as a collection of smoothed plasma particles with temperature, location, size, and abundances. X-ray data are predicted and iterated using MCMC.

Croton et al. investigate the growth of galaxies and SMBH using semi-analytic models on top of very large LCDM simulations.

genrsp

Finished the upgrade to genrsp (at least for the moment). Now v2.0. The major changes are

1. Response energies and channel definitions can now be read from input (ascii) files. This required adding new parameters resp_reln, resp_file, chan_reln, chan_file.
   
2. If the response energies and/or channel definitions are not read from the file then the parameters to define them have been altered to set the number of energies/channels rather than their size. This will allow an extension to logarithmic intervals at some time in the future.
3. The response energy parameter names now all start resp_. To avoid possible confusion the resolution parameters res_reln and res_file have been renamed to resol_reln and resol_file
4. The resol_file input file format has been altered to allow multiple response peaks. genrsp can now build a response with multiple gaussian peaks from a given input energy (eg photopeak and escapes). At present the input file is ascii but a FITS format will be supported when a standard has been defined.

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