Mammalian femora across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary in eastern Montana

Our understanding of latest Cretaceous and earliest Paleogene mammalian evolution is based almost entirely on the dental fossil record. Mammalian postcranial fossils are rare and mostly found as isolated elements in latest Cretaceous and earliest Paleogene vertebrate microfossil assemblages of North America. Although placing these fossils in a tooth-based taxonomic framework is difficult, they can provide insight into locomotor diversity and habitat preference to complement diet reconstructions and diversity estimates from dental fossils. Here, we describe 64 femora of mammals recovered from latest Cretaceous (Lancian) and earliest Paleogene (Puercan) localities in eastern Montana. We sorted these based on morphology and size (morphotypes). In some cases, morphotypes were tentatively assigned to dentally based taxa that are known from these strata.Although our resulting femoral dataset is small relative to the study area's dental dataset, we show several key findings. First, there is a greater morphological diversity of multituberculate femora than previously recognized, especially in the latest Cretaceous sample. In contrast, metatherians, which have a high relative abundance in Lancian Hell Creek Formation dental assemblages, are absent from our postcranial samples; eutherian femora are only present in the Puercan assemblages. Second, we record a minor decrease in morphotype richness across the K–Pg boundary that is associated with an increase in mean specimen size, due to the appearance of a few significantly larger-bodied, immigrant taxa. Among the eutherians, there are two specimens of larger-bodied early Puercan archaic ungulates, a very large specimen of a middle/late Puercan taeniodont, pantodont, or triisodontid, as well as a specimen possibly attributed to a “plesiadapiform” archaic primate. Third, preliminary functional morphologic analyses of the more complete specimens suggest that locomotor diversity increased from mainly arboreal or terrestrial/saltatorial multituberculates in the latest Cretaceous to include a fossorial multituberculate and potentially an arboreal eutherian in the early Paleocene. These patterns parallel those previously reported from a dental dataset and indicate that postcranial data are valuable as an independent means to test hypotheses of taxonomic and ecomorphological diversity across the K–Pg boundary.     

ASCA observations of OAO 1657−415 and its dust-scattered X-ray halo

We report on two ASCA observations of the high-mass X-ray binary pulsar OAO 1657−415. A short observation near mid-eclipse caught the source in a low-intensity state, with a weak continuum and iron emission dominated by the 6.4-keV fluorescent line. A later, longer observation found the source in a high-intensity state and covered the uneclipsed through mid-eclipse phases. In the high-intensity state, the non-eclipse spectrum has an absorbed continuum component due to scattering by material near the pulsar and 80 per cent of the fluorescent iron emission comes from less than 19 light-second away from the pulsar. We find a dust-scattered X-ray halo whose intensity decays through the eclipse. We use this halo to estimate the distance to the source as 7.1 ± 1.3 kpc.     

双基地激光测风雷达回波信号仿真研究

本文针对传统的体散射模型并未考虑大气不均匀性对信号传输的影响等问题,通过引入垂直非均匀的大气参数改进了模型,并利用其建立了体目标的双基地激光测风雷达方程,仿真了侧向散射回波信号,并与单基地雷达进行了对比分析。研究表明:水平方向上,双基地激光测风雷达的回波信号分布特征与单基地雷达差异较大,其回波信号等值线在近地面为卵形线,随着探测高度的增加,回波信号等值线逐渐变为以主、被动雷达为焦点的椭圆形,并最终趋近于圆形;垂直方向上,双基地激光测风雷达的回波信号随高度衰减剧烈,近地面的回波能量约为10^-10 J,4 km高度的回波能量约为10^-15J,在中低层大气(0~10 km),回波信号中气溶胶散射占比大,在高层大气(10 km以上),分子散射占比大。     

Infrared photometry of AGB stars

The goal of this article is to show that, if one avoids star forming regions, mass-losing AGB stars can generally be selected from the data that will be provided by the near-infrared surveys which are presently considered. Also, if IRAS data are available, the separation between carbon-rich and oxygen-rich stars can be operated by their positions in infrared colour diagrams. In extragalactic systems, red supergiants can be discriminated from AGB stars by their luminosities.based on observations obtained with the ESO 1-m telescope     

Far-ultraviolet extinction and diffuse interstellar bands

We relate the equivalent widths of the major diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) near 5797 and 5780 Å with different colour excesses, normalized by E ( B − V ) , which characterize the growth of interstellar extinction in different wavelength ranges. It is demonstrated that the two DIBs correlate best with different parts of the extinction curve, and the ratio of these diffuse bands is best correlated with the far-ultraviolet (UV) rise. A number of peculiar lines of sight are also found, indicating that the carriers of some DIBs and the far-UV extinction can be separated in certain environments, e.g. towards the Per OB2 association.     

A submillimetre survey of the star formation history of radio galaxies

We present the results of the first major systematic submillimetre survey of radio galaxies spanning the redshift range 1< z <5. The primary aim of this work is to elucidate the star formation history of this sub class of elliptical galaxies by tracing the cosmological evolution of dust mass. Using SCUBA on the JCMT, we have obtained 850-μm photometry of 47 radio galaxies to a consistent rms depth of 1 mJy, and have detected dust emission in 14 cases. The radio galaxy targets have been selected from a series of low-frequency radio surveys of increasing depth (3CRR, 6CE, etc.), in order to allow us to separate the effects of increasing redshift and increasing radio power on submillimetre luminosity. Although the dynamic range of our study is inevitably small, we find clear evidence that the typical submillimetre luminosity (and hence dust mass) of a powerful radio galaxy is a strongly increasing function of redshift; the detection rate rises from ≃15 per cent at z <2.5 to ≳75 per cent at z >2.5, and the average submillimetre luminosity rises at a rate ∝(1+ z )³ out to z ≃4. Moreover, our extensive sample allows us to argue that this behaviour is not driven by underlying correlations with other radio galaxy properties such as radio power, radio spectral index, or radio source size/age. Although radio selection may introduce other more subtle biases, the redshift distribution of our detected objects is in fact consistent with the most recent estimates of the redshift distribution of comparably bright submillimetre sources discovered in blank field surveys. The evolution of submillimetre luminosity found here for radio galaxies may thus be representative of massive ellipticals in general.