Hydrogen fluence in Genesis collectors: Implications for acceleration of solar wind and for solar metallicity

NASA's Genesis mission was flown to capture samples of the solar wind and return them to the Earth for measurement. The purpose of the mission was to determine the chemical and isotopic composition of the Sun with significantly better precision than known before. Abundance data are now available for noble gases, magnesium, sodium, calcium, potassium, aluminum, chromium, iron, and other elements. Here, we report abundance data for hydrogen in four solar wind regimes collected by the Genesis mission (bulk solar wind, interstream low‐energy wind, coronal hole high‐energy wind, and coronal mass ejections). The mission was not designed to collect hydrogen, and in order to measure it, we had to overcome a variety of technical problems, as described herein. The relative hydrogen fluences among the four regimes should be accurate to better than ±5–6%, and the absolute fluences should be accurate to ±10%. We use the data to investigate elemental fractionations due to the first ionization potential during acceleration of the solar wind. We also use our data, combined with regime data for neon and argon, to estimate the solar neon and argon abundances, elements that cannot be measured spectroscopically in the solar photosphere.     

All you ever wanted to know about optical long baseline stellar interferometry, but were too shy to ask your adviser

I try to present a small view of the properties and issues related to astronomical interferometry observations. I recall a bit of history of the technique, give some basic assessments to the principle of interferometry, and finally, describe physical processes and limitations that affect optical long baseline interferometry and which are, in general, very useful for everyday work. Therefore, this text is not intended to perform strong demonstrations and show accurate results, but rather to transmit the general “feeling” one needs to have to not be destabilised by the first contact to real world interferometry.     

Frozen orbits at high eccentricity and inclination: application to Mercury orbiter

We hereby study the stability of a massless probe orbiting around an oblate central body (planet or planetary satellite) perturbed by a third body, assumed to lay in the equatorial plane (Sun or Jupiter for example) using a Hamiltonian formalism. We are able to determine, in the parameters space, the location of the frozen orbits, namely orbits whose orbital elements remain constant on average, to characterize their stability/unstability and to compute the periods of the equilibria. The proposed theory is general enough, to be applied to a wide range of probes around planet or natural planetary satellites. The BepiColombo mission is used to motivate our analysis and to provide specific numerical data to check our analytical results. Finally, we also bring to the light that the coefficient J ₂ is able to protect against the increasing of the eccentricity due to the Kozai-Lidov effect and the coefficient J ₃ determines a shift of the equilibria.     

DBSCAN Clustering Algorithm for the Detection of Nearby Open Clusters Based on Gaia-DR2two

In this paper, we attempt to use the DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) clustering algorithm to detect nearby open clusters based on the Gaia Data Release 2 (Gaia-DR2). We select 594284 stars (within a distance of 100 pc to the Sun) from the Gaia-DR2 catalog, and construct a five-dimensional phase space (three-dimensional spatial position and two-dimensional proper motion) in order to obtain reliable cluster members. At the data preprocessing stage, we normalize each dimension of data to the [0, 1] interval in order to avoid the effect of inconsistent units. Then, we use the k-dist graphs to determine the input parameters of the DBSCAN Algorithm. Finally, we obtain 133 reliable members using the DBSCAN algorithm, which correspond to two open clusters—Hyades and Coma. According to these cluster members, the distances to the Hyades and Coma clusters are determined to be (6.5 ± 0.3) pc and (4.9 ± 0.4) pc, respectively.     

SILENT: Spectrograph simulation and emulation tool

A software tool which was designed to compute basic optical parameters of spectrographs is presented. The idea is to find a first layout of the spectrograph by focusing on the science goal to which the instrument needs to be adapted. We focus on systems used in astrophysical instrumentation. These include classical, 3D and echelle spectrographs. The code also computes efficiencies of the specified systems, expected signal-to-noise ratios, layout of the spectral orders on the detector, etc. Furthermore, a complete image seen by the detector can be simulated. This artificial data are used to compare the performance of different designs and to test data reduction pipelines, before the system is being physically build. Some additional tools are implemented to characterise special optical devices, for example the telescope-spectrograph-interface and to support the design process. Hence, SILENT is a pre-design tool to determine the required optical paraxial parameters of the system to meet the science application.     

The Asiago Extrasolar Planet Transit Search

RATS is an Italian project devoted to Hot Jupiter search with the transit method. A planet transiting in front of a host star can be mimed by several, and well defined, astrophysical phenomena (Brown, 2003). In order to recognize these false alarms we can utilize a preventive strategy to limit false alarm rates and a spectroscopic follow up to refuse no transit candidates. As preventive strategy it is important to develop an accurate target field selection, with well defined requisites, in order to maximize the solar type star numbers and to minimize the risk of possible astrophysical false alarms.     

Decametric radio spectra and positions during the flare of August 28, 1966: 1522 UT

During a period of intense decametric continuum arising near the center of the sun, there occurred additional very strong emission closely associated with the flare beginning at 1522 UT on August 28, 1966. Owing to strong ionospheric absorption from about 1527 UT on, which eliminated telecommunications interference, the frequency range over which the flare-associated emission appears is unusually large, from the upper limit of the spectrograph, 41 MHz, to about 11 MHz, where external reflection cuts off the solar signals. Strong bursts of Type III (fast drift) occur from 1527 to 1531 UT, and a complex Type II (slow drift) from 1532 to 1547 UT. As the Type-II burst progresses at frequencies from 15 to 25 MHz, Northward position shifts of many solar radii probably take place; at higher frequencies the burst moves in a complicated pattern through a much narrower range of distances to the North of the sun. Type-IV emission, from 1540 UT on, moves a large distance to the sun's North, and then, after 1600 UT, returns to a stable position quite close to the sun.     

Fitting the integrated spectral energy distributions of galaxies

Fitting the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies is an almost universally used technique that has matured significantly in the last decade. Model predictions and fitting procedures have improved significantly over this time, attempting to keep up with the vastly increased volume and quality of available data. We review here the field of SED fitting, describing the modelling of ultraviolet to infrared galaxy SEDs, the creation of multiwavelength data sets, and the methods used to fit model SEDs to observed galaxy data sets. We touch upon the achievements and challenges in the major ingredients of SED fitting, with a special emphasis on describing the interplay between the quality of the available data, the quality of the available models, and the best fitting technique to use in order to obtain a realistic measurement as well as realistic uncertainties. We conclude that SED fitting can be used effectively to derive a range of physical properties of galaxies, such as redshift, stellar masses, star formation rates, dust masses, and metallicities, with care taken not to over-interpret the available data. Yet there still exist many issues such as estimating the age of the oldest stars in a galaxy, finer details of dust properties and dust-star geometry, and the influences of poorly understood, luminous stellar types and phases. The challenge for the coming years will be to improve both the models and the observational data sets to resolve these uncertainties. The present review will be made available on an interactive, moderated web page (), where the community can access and change the text. The intention is to expand the text and keep it up to date over the coming years.     

On making radio contact with extraterrestrial civilizations

The problem of, attempting to make radio contact, with other technological civilizations is examined. It is argued that there are few (perhaps indeed no) omnidirectional radio beacons in the Galaxy primarily because any such beacon, to be effective, would have to be designed for a call-response time of at least some 10⁴ years, which is much too long to be likely to be acceptable to governments. A consequence, is that any search program by us would have little chance of detecting incoming signals.Paper dedicated to Professor Hannes Alfvén on the occasion of his 70th birthday, 30th May, 1978.     

Dust temperature and the submillimetre–radio flux density ratio as a redshift indicator for distant galaxies

It is difficult to identify the distant galaxies selected in existing submillimetre-wave surveys, because their positions are known at best to only several arcsec. Centimetre-wave VLA observations are required in order to determine positions to subarcsec accuracy, and so to allow reliable optical identifications to be made. Carilli & Yun pointed out that the ratio of the radio to submillimetre-wave flux densities provides a redshift indicator for dusty star-forming galaxies, when compared with the tight correlation between the far-infrared and radio flux densities observed in low-redshift galaxies. This method does provide a useful, albeit imprecise, indication of the distance to a submillimetre-selected galaxy. Unfortunately, it does not provide an unequivocal redshift estimate, as the degeneracy between the effects of increasing the redshift of a galaxy and decreasing its dust temperature is not broken.     

Alteration of five organic compounds by glow discharge plasma and UV light under simulated Mars conditions

The Viking missions to Mars failed to detect any organic material in regolith samples. Since then, several removal mechanisms of organic material have been proposed. Two of these proposed methods are removal due to exposure to plasmas created in dust devils and exposure to UV irradiation. The experiments presented here were performed to identify similarities between the two potential removal mechanisms and to identify any compounds produced from these mechanisms that would have been difficult for the Viking instruments to detect. Five organic compounds, phenanthrene, octadecane, octadecanoic acid, decanophenone and benzoic acid, were exposed to a glow discharge plasma created in simulated martian atmospheres as might be present in dust devils, and to UV irradiation similar to that found at the surface of Mars. Glow discharge exposure was carried out in a chamber with 6.9 mbar pressure of a Mars like gas composed mostly of carbon dioxide. The plasma was characterized using emission spectroscopy and found to contain cations and excited neutral species including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen. UV irradiation experiments were performed in a Mars chamber which simulates the temperature, pressure, atmospheric composition, and UV fluence rates of equatorial Mars. The non-volatile residues left after each exposure were characterized by mass loss, infrared spectroscopy and high resolution mass spectrometry. Oxidized, higher molecular weight versions of the parent compounds containing carbonyl, hydroxyl and alkenyl functional groups were identified. The presence of these oxidized compounds suggests that searches for organic material in soils on Mars use instrumentation suitable for detection of compounds which contain the above functional groups. Discussions of possible reaction mechanisms are given.     

AQUAdexIM: highly efficient in-memory indexing and querying of astronomy time series images

Astronomy has always been, and will continue to be, a data-based science, and astronomers nowadays are faced with increasingly massive datasets, one key problem of which is to efficiently retrieve the desired cup of data from the ocean. AQUAdexIM, an innovative spatial indexing and querying method, performs highly efficient on-the-fly queries under users’ request to search for Time Series Images from existing observation data on the server side and only return the desired FITS images to users, so users no longer need to download entire datasets to their local machines, which will only become more and more impractical as the data size keeps increasing. Moreover, AQUAdexIM manages to keep a very low storage space overhead and its specially designed in-memory index structure enables it to search for Time Series Images of a given area of the sky 10 times faster than using Redis, a state-of-the-art in-memory database.     

The effect of hypothetical diproton stability on the universe

By calculation of the proton-proton capture cross-section, it is shown that the existence of a bound diproton state would not lead to significant production of diprotons during big bang nucleosynthesis, contrary to popular belief. In typical stellar interiors, the stability of diprotons would lead to a reaction pathway for converting protons to deuterons perhaps ∼10¹⁰ times faster than the usual weak capture reaction. This would prevent stars of the familiar hot, dense type from occurring in the universe. However, if diproton stability is achieved by an increase in the low-energy strong coupling, gs, then stars with temperatures and densities sufficiently reduced so as to offset the faster reaction pathway to deuterium will appear to meet elementary stability criteria. The claim that there is a fine-tuned, anthropic upper bound to the strong force which ensures diproton instability therefore appears to be unfounded.     

Digitization and Scientific Exploitation of the Italian and Vatican Astronomical Plate Archives

There is a widespread interest to digitize the precious information contained in the astronomical plate archives, both for the preservation of their content and for its fast distribution to all interested researchers in order to achieve their better scientific exploitation. This paper presents the first results of our large-scale project to digitize the archive of plates of the Italian Astronomical Observatories and of the Specola Vaticana. Similar systems, composed by commercial flat-bed retro-illuminated scanners plus dedicated personal computers and acquisition and analysis software, have been installed in all participating Institutes. Ad-hoc codes have been developed to acquire the data, to test the suitability of the machines to our scientific needs, and to reduce the digital data in order to extract the astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic content. Two more elements complete the overall project: the provision of high quality BVRI CCD sequences in selected fields with the Campo Imperatore telescopes, and the distribution of the digitized information to all interested researchers via the Web. The methods we have derived in the course of this project have been already applied successfully to plates taken by other Observatories, for instance at Byurakan and at Hamburg.     

Precise measurement of the solar gravitational red shift

We present the concept and the status of a multi-year project based on a new method to measure the Gravitational Red Shift of the Solar Spectrum with high precision. This project is aimed to conduct experimental verifications of the effect that the Einstein theory of General Relativity predicts for the frequencies of the Fraunhofer lines, that is, the light spectrum emitted by the Sun in its strong gravitational field. Previous determinations of such effect is limited to a precision of 2%. In order to discriminate between classical and relativistic explanations, we need to be sensitive to one part per million of the predicted effect. We have developed a new powerful technique, the Magneto-Optical Filter, that is able to provide far better precision and, for the future, possible space instrumentations able to extend our test to the second-order effect of the relativistic equivalence principle, never done before. The present paper is intended to describe the instrumentation, the procedure and the first encouraging results.     

Combined low-thrust propulsion and invariant manifold trajectories to capture NEOs in the Sun–Earth circular restricted three-body problem

In this paper, a method to capture near-Earth objects (NEOs) incorporating low-thrust propulsion into the invariant manifolds technique is investigated. Assuming that a tugboat-spacecraft is in a rendez-vous condition with the candidate asteroid, the aim is to take the joint spacecraft-asteroid system to a selected periodic orbit of the Sun–Earth restricted three-body system: the orbit can be either a libration point periodic orbit (LPO) or a distant prograde periodic orbit (DPO) around the Earth. In detail, low-thrust propulsion is used to bring the joint spacecraft-asteroid system from the initial condition to a point belonging to the stable manifold associated to the final periodic orbit: from here onward, thanks to the intrinsic dynamics of the physical model adopted, the flight is purely ballistic. Dedicated guided and capture sets are introduced to exploit the combined use of low-thrust propulsion with stable manifolds trajectories, aiming at defining feasible first guess solutions. Then, an optimal control problem is formulated to refine and improve them. This approach enables a new class of missions, whose solutions are not obtainable neither through the patched-conics method nor through the classic invariant manifolds technique.     

AQD occurrence at Addis Ababa,Trivandrum and Alibag

The effect of the equatorial electrojet is sufficient to reduce the probability of an abnormal quiet day occurring at Addis Ababa, Trivandrum and Alibag. Addis Ababa AQD occurrence exhibits an anomalous or subdued relationship to solar intensity, compared to that of Alibag, Trivandrum, and Greenwich/Abinger/Hartland; this is thought to be due to some unknown characteristic of the PM electrojet. Few AQD's are common to Addis Ababa and Trivandrum, Addis Ababa and Alibag, and Trivandrum and Alibag compared to the number common to Abinger and Wingst.     

Phase correlations in chaotic dynamics: a Shannon entropy measure

In the present work, we investigate phase correlations by recourse to the Shannon entropy. Using theoretical arguments, we show that the entropy provides an accurate measure of phase correlations in any dynamical system, in particular when dealing with a chaotic diffusion process. We apply this approach to different low-dimensional maps in order to show that indeed the entropy is very sensitive to the presence of correlations among the successive values of angular variables, even when it is weak. Later on, we apply this approach to unveil strong correlations in the time evolution of the phases involved in the Arnold’s Hamiltonian that lead to anomalous diffusion, particularly when the perturbation parameters are comparatively large. The obtained results allow us to discuss the validity of several approximations and assumptions usually introduced to derive a local diffusion coefficient in multidimensional near-integrable Hamiltonian systems, in particular the so-called reduced stochasticity approximation.     

Multidimensional simulations of radiative transfer in Type Ia supernovae

A three-dimensional Monte Carlo code for modelling radiation transport in Type Ia supernovae is described. In addition to tracking Monte Carlo quanta to follow the emission, scattering and deposition of radiative energy, a scheme involving volume-based Monte Carlo estimators is used to allow properties of the emergent radiation field to be extracted for specific viewing angles in a multidimensional structure. This eliminates the need to compute spectra or light curves by angular binning of emergent quanta. The code is applied to two test problems to illustrate consequences of multidimensional structure on the modelling of light curves. First, elliptical models are used to quantify how large-scale asphericity can introduce angular dependence to light curves. Secondly, a model which incorporates complex structural inhomogeneity, as predicted by modern explosion models, is used to investigate how such structure may affect light-curve properties.