Preprints

Page et al. find that broad-lined z~2 QSOs with X-ray absorption are embedded in submillimeter luminous starbursts implying that the X-ray absorption is unrelated to the AGN torus.

Balogh et al. compare analytical models of the ICM with recent observations and find that a range of entropy floors are required at a given halo mass.

Ho et al. use large-scale simulations to study cluster ellipticity as a cosmological probe and conclude that it provides another route to constraining cosmological parameters from large cluster samples.

Fang et al. argue that the z~0 absorbers seen in high resolution spectra of AGN are due to the hot gas associated with the Galaxy.

Sorkin republishes an old paper using Bayesian methods to derive a goodness-of-fit balancing likelihood against the number of fitting parameters.

Belczynski et al. describe the StarTrack population synthesis code for the formation and evolution of compact objects.

Dunn et al. discuss the behaviour of rising bubbles in the ICM and the precession of the 3C 84 jets in the Perseus clusters.

Preprints

Crummy et al. fit XMM spectra from a sample of SyI with a relativistically-blurred photoionized disc and find this model reproduces the continuum shape, including the soft excess and many features usually interpreted as absorption, in all sources.

Fabbiano reviews X-ray source populations in galaxies.

Vernaleo & Reynolds perform 3-D hydro simulations of jets in the ICM and find that the jet energy input cannot halt the cooling flow because the energy is transmitted out of the cooling region along a low-density channel.

Sun et al. observe a 70 kpc tail behind a late-type galaxy in A3627 and use this to place constraints on turbulence in the ICM.

Jahoda et al. summarize the RXTE PCA calibration.

Hamilton et al. use archival WFPC2 imaging of 70 QSOs to find a relation between nuclear luminosity and the size and effective surface magnitude of the bulge.

Bridges et al. present a Bayesian analysis of the primordial power-law spectrum.

Baker et al. present new numerical GR techniques which enable accurate determination of GW signal from merging BHs.

Hughes motivates the widespread acceptance of BHs and describes planned tests of the hypothesis.

Nath et al. consider the production of Li6 by spallation of cosmic rays on ambient gas and show that the amount of energy generated is consistent with the extra entropy seen in the ICM.

Agueros et al. cross-correlate the RASS and SDSS looking for X-ray sources with no optical counterparts as a way of searching for isolated NS.

Cappi et al. present the results from a complete XMM survey of nearby AGN and find results broadly in agreement with the standard unified model.

Preprints

Bregman shows that a claimed relationship between radio, X-ray luminosity, and BH mass in AGN is an artefact of the flux-limited sample.

Armus et al. find evidence with Spitzer for an AGN in NGC 6240 - consistent with the hard X-ray results.

Stuhlinger et al. summarize the status of XMM-Newton calibration.

Donahue et al. present Chandra entropy profiles of 9 cooling flow clusters and find the profiles are similar over a range of 3 in temperature.

Ghizzardi et al. find cold fronts in 21 out of 62 clusters searched using XMM data.

Preprints

Badenes et al. compare the XMM and Chandra observations of Tycho with detailed hydro calculations of a variety of proposed models for SNIa and find the observations are consistent with a 1-D delayed detonation model.

Weinberg discusses multiverses and anthropic arguments.

Mathews et al. show that spherical shock waves in the ICM dissipate most of their energy near the center of the cluster causing temperatures higher than observed hence are not good candidates for solving the cooling flow problem.

Henry et al. present the results from the complete ROSAT NEP survey.

Haehnelt et al. suggest that the bright QSO HE0450 which has no detected galaxy is an SMBH ejected from its galaxy during a merger. However Merritt et al. argue against this since the kick velocity required is too large and claim that previous observations have overestimated the size of the SMBH and hence the expected luminosity of the underlying galaxy.

Bregman et al. summarize their results of OVI observations of 24 galaxies using FUSE. They find a correlation between the cooling flow rate from OVI and that from X-rays but with a large scatter. The cause of the scatter is not clear but is not obviously due to heating.

Weisskopf & Hughes give an overview of the first 6 years of Chandra observations of SNR.

Preprints

Kim et al. combine Chandra and HST data to examine the relationship between LMXBs and Globular Clusters in 6 Elliptical galaxies. They confirm that the probability of a GC containing a LMXB correlates with metallicity and also find a correlation with galactocentric distance.

Dravins et al. discuss the design of an optical instrument designed to search for variability on nanosecond scales and planned for the 100m-class OWL telescope.

Kashlinsky et al. use fluctuations in the background of a deep Spitzer observation to find evidence for Pop III stars.

Preprints

Noble et al. describe parallelizing ISIS using the PVM.

Chevallier et al. discuss the relative roles of absorption and reflection in low energy X-ray spectra of AGN.

Belczynski et al. calculates the contribution to the LISA signal from mass transferring binaries.

Hallman et al. present calculations of H_0 based on X-ray/SZE observations of clusters assuming a universal temperature profile. This gives H_0 values closer to the standard and with smaller variance.

Blustin et al. do principle component analysis of the X-ray variability of NGC 7469.

seg fault in pexrav

Roderick Johnstone reported a seg fault in pexrav when running on a 64 bit Athlon. Craig spotted a problem on the first invocation of the model in the routine sigmabfa. There was a similar bug in pexriv, bexrav, and ntee which all use copies of this routine. At some point I need to rationalize all these programs and remove duplicated routines. Fixed as v11.3.2r and 12.2.1i & j.

Keywords: HEAsoft, xspec

xselect manual

Updated the manual available on the web. Did the LaTeX and HTML conversion on genji in TEXT/XSELECT then copied to olegacy. Note that latex2html makes an xsel.tex top-level file. Copy that to xselect.html, remove all the contents links and tidy up. Add the contents links to node1.html. Change references in several files from xsel.tex to xselect.tex.

Keywords: HEAsoft, xselect

Preprints

Gastaldello et al. analyze Chandra and XMM observations of poor clusters and find cool cores, a peak in temperature around 0.1 virial radii and decline. NFW model fits give concentration parameters and virial masses consistent with numerical simulations.

Done & Gierlinski show that an apparent highly relativistic line in XTE J1650 can be modelled by a relativistic line and Fe K line absorption from an outflowing disk wind - this allows the inner disk to be truncated.

Dave et al. provide an overview of current issues in galaxy formation theory.

HEAsoft 6.0.4

HEAsoft 6.0.4 is now available. This is an update for Swift but also includes XSPEC v12.2.1 and
changes to cleansis and xselect/extractor for Suzaku.

Preprints

Morganti et al. detect 1000 km/s outflows of neutral material from seven radio galaxies. This rate of up to 50 Msun/yr is comparable to outflow rates from ULIRGs.

Aharonian et al. suggest a possible associate between HESS J1825 and the pulsar wind nebula of PSR B1823 based on XMM observations of the latter.

Kauffmann et al. look at the scatter in colours and spectral line strengths of local galaxies and deduce that star formation in more compact galaxies occurs in high amplitude bursts.

Fabian et al. present first results from the 1Msec Chandra Perseus cluster observation. The pressure ripples observed in shorter observations are shown to be isothermal sound waves that can provide a heat source able to balance radiative cooling.

Chen & Pradhan calculate the ratio of the FeXVII 3s/3d lines using different electron distribution functions and surmise that some of the differences between astrophysical and laboratory measurements may be due to different plasma conditions.

extractor rotated box regions

My fix to the elliptical regions back in July broke the rotated box regions. The subroutines for boxes and ellipses define the rotation angle in the opposite sense. Now fixed so that both are correct (v4.61).

Keywords: HEAsoft, extractor

xselect bug causing wrong date on lightcurve plots

The values of MJDREFI/F were not propagated everywhere correctly. I think the only consequence was that the label written at the top of the lightcurve plots gave the delta MJD not the MJD. Also did some reorganising of code and split the clear functions out into their own file (xsel_clear.f).

Keywords: HEAsoft, xselect

Preprints

Wyse & Gilmore review the Galactic populations of long-lived stars and how they can be used to investigate chemical and dynamical evolution.

Wolter et al. find three high-luminosity, narrow-line objects (ie QSO2) in the ROSAT NEP region which XMM spectra show to have no absorption above Galactic.

Revnivtsev et al. analyze RXTE scan and slew observations of the Galactic ridge X-ray emission and show that the intensity correlates with the near-infrared surface brightness and hence that the ridge emission is likely made up of many low luminosity point sources.

O'Hara et al. examine the effects of cool-cores and mergers on cluster scaling relations. They suggest that effects of cool-cores can be seen outside the cores themselves indicating that global mechanisms are at work. The evidence does not support the scenario that clusters develop cool-cores till disrupted by mergers.

Plaszczynski et al. present a fast algorithm for generating 1/f^alpha noise by filtering a white noise signal.

Liedahl & Torres provide a tutorial summary of Fe K line emission from accretion disks.

Lieu et al. claim that by comparing a WMAP and X-ray observations of a randomly-selected sample of 20 nearby clusters that the observed SZE effect is not as large as predicted.

Goad et al. describe deep XMM observations of the ULX HoII X-1 and conclude it is a high-luminosity analog of a Galactic microquasar.

Kontar et al. calculate angle-dependent Green's functions for the Compton reflection problem in Solar flares.

new models added to xspec v12

I've added Martin Still's dust extinction models and Slava Zavlin and George Pavlov's NS atmosphere model to the xspec v12 for the forthcoming release. When the release is out I will retire them from the additional models webpage.

Keywords: HEAsoft, xspec

PLT command lengths in xspec v11

Bill ran into a problem running the Swift processing script under Hera. He needed to create a gif file in xspec v11 in a remote directory with a long pathname. This overran the string length available in xspec. Modified xspec to allow longer PLT command names and device names. I also had to modify PLT to increase the allowed device name length. The limit now is 80 characters which seems to be imposed by the PGPLOT code. I've not tried to track down where that is set.

Theatre: Cuttin' Up

Last night went to Arena stage for the first night preview of world premiere. Cuttin' Up is written and directed by Charles Randolph-Wright adapted from the book of the same name by Craig Marberry, who visited African-American barbershops around the US collecting the stories told there. The barbershop and the church are the two places African-American men can gather and talk and a rich history has built up around the former. The play presents that history as stories told by the three barbers and their customers, all of whom are played five actors in a wide variety of wigs. Dramatic tension is supplied by the conflict between the owner and the man he wants to be his successor, but who has a history of leaving cities and marriages. I found the story suprisingly effective since it is little more than a rack on which to hang a wonderful collection of vignettes and songs. Among the former my favourite was a competition between a Baptist and an AME preacher. The Baptist played by Bill Grimmette finished with a peroration on the importance of the barbershop delivered in full sermon style.

The show was almost stolen by Marva Hicks playing all the female characters from hot youngster, through mother from the projects, R&B singer, outrageously-dressed Texan female barber, to the 75-year-old mother of one of the barbers. She and many other cast members pulled off some very fast changes, both of clothes and hair styles. The other star of the show is the costume department with their wonderful collection of wigs all the way up to a 2-ft wide Afro.

With an almost full house for first-night preview and a standing ovation at the end this one will be a hit for Arena.

chkrmf fix

Fixed infinite loop which arises if one of the extensions doesn't have its EXTNAME set. Also replaced explicit loop through extensions with calls to go to named extensions. Note that this program and its peers (chkarf, chkpha) could do with an overhaul and check for consistency with the current standard.

Keywords: HEAsoft

minor extractor bug with multiple event files

There was an error in the code comparing TLMIN/MAX values for WMAP columns when reading multiple event files. This produced a spurious warning message about different sizes for XCOLH and YCOLH columns. Fixed in v4.60.

Keywords: HEAsoft, extractor

Preprints

Li-Xin Li & Paczynski present a new procedure for smoothing GRB lightcurves and calculating the variability. This leads to a very tight correlation between variability and peak luminosity.

Muanwong et al. use hydro simulations to investigate the evolution of X-ray cluster scaling relations under different mechanisms to increasing the entropy. They find indications that early, widespread pre-heating is favoured.

Dotti et al. study the inspiral of binary black holes inside a massive circum-nuclear disk.

Markwardt et al. present the first BAT serendipitous source catalog. The final catalog is expected to contain > 200 AGN and reach a limiting flux of 1e-11 in the 14-195 keV band.

Brewer & Lewis use Bayesian Inference and MCMC simulations on the strong gravitational lens problem.

Regimbau & Pacheco estimate the gravitational background from magnetars and note that it could mask a contribution from the early Universe.