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 The ftools copy is two years and the Xspec copy is four years out-of-date.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

xselect and Astro-E

When I checked in the change to xselect.mdb for TELESCOP=Astro-E2 I accidentally overrwrote the changes for the default WMAP. Corrected this so that fbin=hbin=1 and imagecoord=wmapcoord=SKY.

Keywords: xselect, Astro-E2

v11 projct model

Glenn Morris hit a seg fault when using projct with > 25 shells. This occurred in the set-up for a diagnostic message writing out the projection matrix. Just truncated this to only write 25 columns. v11.3.2f.

Keywords: heasoft. xspec

Preprints

Mannheim reviews the underpinnings of standard gravity theory and considers what is required to explain dark matter and energy as errors in the current theory.

Jacobsen et al. review the prospects for detecting possible Lorentz violations predicted by quantum gravity theories.

Takizawa presents 3-D hydro simulations of a moving substructure in the ICM.

Clarkson & Maartens argue that if string theory is correct and the Universe is an embedded 3-brane then this will introduce oscillations in the GW signal from BHs.

Treister & Urry show that the optical/IR/X-ray content of deep surveys and the spectral shape of the XRB can be explained by a model with a constant ratio of obscured to unobscured AGN.

Kocsis et al. calculate LISA error ellipses for BH mergers and argue that if they are accompanied by Eddington-limit quasar activity they can be uniquely identified to z~1.

Buote et al. present Chandra observations of A644, a radio-quiet cool-core cluster. They find that the inward decline in temperature and entropy reverses inside the core. The peak is offset from the centroid with the cD midway between suggesting a merger.

Finoguenov et al. put together XMM samples of groups and galaxies to confirm an entropy ramp as the explanation for the scaling relations and find a mild evolution in entropy of clusters.

Preprints

Williams et al. discuss Chandra and FUSE absorption lines towards Mkn421 and argue that they have detected the IGM at z~0.

Finoguenov et al analyze an XMM mosaic of A3266 and find an extended region of low entropy gas which they interpret as stripped from an infalling subcluster core.

Wolfe and Melia argue that continuous stochastic acceleration cannot explain the hard X-ray emission from Coma because the energy gained by the particles is redistributed over the whole plasma on a fast timescale.

Crawford et al. present optical and Chandra observations of the filament in A1795.

Willis et al. claim detections of polarization in GRB based on detailed modelling of Compton scattering of the prompt emission off the Earth's atmosphere.

Berger et al. present the results of optical, near-IR and radio follow-ups of Swift bursts. Up to a third of the bursts may be dark.

Subramanian et al. discuss turbulence and magnetic fields in the ICM.

Brogan et al. identify a HESS source with a source of non-thermal radio and X-ray emission due to a young shell-type SNR.

posm model

Chris Shrader provided an improved version of the posm model which performs a trapezoid integration over each energy bin. Available for v11 as bug fix 11.3.2e.

Keywords: heasoft, xspec

kbmodels

Terry Gaetz spotted a couple of errors in sizing of the param array in kbmodels.f. These generated compiler warnings but probably had no effect. Fixed them.

Keywords: heasoft

GravStat 2005: Bose

Networks of broadband detectors.
A single broadband detector can be thought of as a network of narrow band detectors.
Mergers have 3 phases - s/n may be small in each phase but combined may exceed threshold. How can we be sure we are associating 3 phases correctly - consistency checks.
Networking broadband detectors -> sky positions, stochastic GW background. Computationally very intensive.
Detectors have hugely different sensitivities - network dimensionality reduced for weakest detectable sources (only most sensitive detectors are likely to see them).
Network of aligned detectors - same signal in all detectors (to within time delay), can trigger on one detector and search on others, improved background determination. But blind spots and cannot find polarization of transients.
Unaligned detectors - can unravel more parameters, signal coverage better.
With more detectors there are more ways of analyzing the data - how do we decide which are best ?
What happens if different detectors have different noise characteristics - gaussian vs non-gaussian ?
In a network of detectors do you set confidence intervals for each unique combination ?
With large numbers of detectors computational costs are high - tricks to control this mutilate the normality of the initial statistic pdf.
How stringent are requirements on calibration accuracies across the network ?
How and when sould we effect astrophysical figures-of-merit, vetoes ? eg suppose derived position is where network has low sensitivity ?

GravStat 2005: Prodi

Time-coincidence search using bar detectors (IGEC). Template search - matched filters optimized for short and rare transients.
Many trials at once (9 pairs + 7 triples + 2 4-folds). Many target thresholds. Directional/non-directional searches.
Control of false dismissal probability - balance between detection efficiency and background fluctuations.
Background noise estimation - 10^3 time lags for pairs, 10^4-10^5 time lags for triples. GOF tests with background model.
Blind analysis - tuning of procedures before looking at data (no playground).
IGEC-2 has agreed on blind data exchange (secret time lag).
Resample by shifting event time series to get statistics of accidental claims.
Realized that technique good for upper limits but optimized for discoveries - false possitives hide true discoveries. Need to decrease false alarm probability (type I error).
Want to build confidence belt based on false alarm probability for each value of unknown parameter. Use Benjamini & Hochberg FDR procedure.
Open questions:
Check fluctuation of random variable FDR with respect to mean
Are we required to report a rejection of the null hypothesis ? - this is claim for an excess correlation in the observations at the true time, not taking into account measured noise background at different time lags - it might not be GW.