Can gas dynamics in centres of galaxies reveal orbiting massive black holes?

If supermassive black holes in centres of galaxies form by merging of black hole remnants of massive Population III stars, then there should be a few black holes of mass one or two orders of magnitude smaller than that of the central ones, orbiting around the centre of a typical galaxy. These black holes constitute a weak perturbation in the gravitational potential, which can generate wave phenomena in gas within a disc close to the centre of the galaxy. Here, we show that a single orbiting black hole generates a three-arm spiral pattern in the central gaseous disc. The density excess in the spiral arms in the disc reaches values of 3–12 per cent when the orbiting black hole is about 10 times less massive than the central black hole. Therefore, the observed density pattern in gas can be used as a signature in detecting the most massive orbiting black holes.     

System for normalization of a hamiltonian function based on lie series

A software system for normalization of a Hamiltonian function is described. A few examples of its applications are given. It is written in PASCAL and runs on an IBM XT/AT with 640 KB memory.     

Assessment of mercury mobility and bioavailability by fractionation method in sediments from coastal zone inundated by the 26 December 2004 tsunami in Thailand

The 26 December 2004 tsunami covered significant portion of a coastal zone with a blanket of potentially contaminated sediments. In this report are presented results on mercury concentrations in sediments deposited by the tsunami in a coastal zone of Thailand. Since the total mercury concentrations are insufficient to assess mercury mobility and bioavailability in sediment, its fractionation was applied. Sediments were sampled within 50 days after the event and analyzed by sequential extraction method. The procedure of sequential extraction involved five subsequent stages performed with solutions of chloroform, deionized water, 0.5 M HCl, 0.2 M NaOH, and aqua regia. The mean concentration of total mercury in sediments was 119 ± 50 ng g⁻¹ dry mass (range 66–230). The fractionation revealed that mercury is mainly bound to the least bioavailable sulphides 75 ± 6% (range 62–86), organomercury compounds 14 ± 7% (range 4–26), and humic matter 9 ± 7% (range 1–27). The lowest contributions bring fractions of water-soluble mercury 0.8 ± 1.0% (range 0.1–3.6) and acid soluble mercury 0.9 ± 0.5% (range 0.2–2.1). Although, the total mercury content is similar in a reference sample and in the tsunami sediments, the highly toxic organomercury fraction contribution is higher in the latter. The results were compared with chemical and sedimentological properties of the sediments but no significant correlations were obtained between them.     

Clustering and visualization of earthquake data in a grid environment

We present a web client-server service WEB-IS, which we have developed for remote analysis and visualization of seismic data consisting of both small magnitude events and large earthquakes. We show that the problem-solving environment (PSE) intended for prediction of large magnitude earthquakes can be based on this WEB-IS idea. The clustering schemes, feature generation, feature extraction techniques and rendering algorithms form a computational framework of this environment. On the other hand, easy and fast access both to the seismic data distributed among distant computing resources and to computational and visualization resources can be realized in a GRID framework. We discuss the usefulness of NaradaBrokering (iNtegrated Asynchronous Real-time Adaptive Distributed Architecture) as a middleware, allowing for flexibility and high throughput for remote visualization of geophysical data. The WEB-IS functionality was tested both on synthetic and the actual earthquake catalogs. We consider the application of similar methodology for tsunami alerts.     

DEVEX-disdrometer evaluation experiment: Basic results and implications for hydrologic studies

Increasing our understanding of the small scale variability of drop size distributions (DSD), and therefore of several bulk characteristics of rainfall processes, has major implications for our interpretation of the remote sensing based estimates of precipitation and its uncertainty. During the spring and summer of 2002 the authors conducted the DEVEX experiment (disdrometer evaluation experiment) to compare measurements of natural rain made with three different types of disdrometers collocated at the Iowa City Municipal Airport in Iowa City, Iowa in the Midwestern United States. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the instruments rather than analysis of the hydrometeorological aspects of the observed events. The comparison demonstrates discrepancies between instruments. The authors discuss the systematic and random effects in terms of rainfall quantities, drop size distribution properties, and the observed drop size vs. velocity relationships. Since the instruments were collocated, the effects of the natural variability of rain are reduced some with time integration, isolating the instrumental differences. The authors discuss the status of DSD measurement technologies and the implications for a range of hydrologic applications from remote sensing of rainfall to atmospheric deposition to soil erosion and sediment transport in the environment. The data set collected during the DEVEX experiment is made available to the research community.     

Methods of Searching for Planets Around Pulsars

Earth, Moon, and Planets -     

Three‐parameter discontinuous distributions for hydrological samples with zero values

A consistent approach to the frequency analysis of hydrologic data in arid and semiarid regions, i.e. the data series containing several zero values (e.g. monthly precipitation in dry seasons, annual peak flow discharges, etc.), requires using discontinuous probability distribution functions. Such an approach has received relatively limited attention. Along the lines of physically based models, the extensions of the Muskingum‐based models to three parameter forms are considered. Using 44 peak flow series from the USGS data bank, the fitting ability of four three‐parameter models was investigated: (1) the Dirac delta combined with Gamma distribution; (2) the Dirac delta combined with two‐parameter generalized Pareto distribution; (3) the Dirac delta combined with two‐parameter Weibull (DWe) distribution; (4) the kinematic diffusion with one additional parameter that controls the probability of the zero event (KD3). The goodness of fit of the models was assessed and compared both by evaluation of discrepancies between the results of both estimation methods (i.e. the method of moments (MOM) and the maximum likelihood method (MLM)) and using the log of likelihood function as a criterion. In most cases, the DWe distribution with MLM‐estimated parameters showed the best fit of all the three‐parameter models. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Non-integrability of the three-body problem

We consider the planar problem of three bodies which attract mutually with the force proportional to a certain negative integer power of the distance between the bodies. We show that such generalisation of the gravitational three-body problem is not integrable in the Liouville sense.