Water transport from the North-east Irish Sea to western Scottish coastal waters: Further observations from time-trend matching of Sellafield radiocaesium

Radiocaesium isotopes, discharged into the North-east Irish Sea from the Sellafield (formerly Windscale) nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Cumbria, have been employed as flow monitors to update and extend the record of coastal water movement from the Irish Sea to the Clyde Sea area and, further north, to Loch Etive. The temporal trends in radiocaesium levels have been used to determine the extent of water mixing en route and to define mean advection rates. Flow conditions from the Irish Sea have changed considerably since the mid-1970s, the residence time of northern Irish Sea waters being ～12 months during 1978–1980 inclusive. Average transport times of four and six months are estimated for the Sellafield to Clyde and Sellafield to Etive transects respectively. Sellafield ¹³⁷Cs levels in seawater were diluted by factors of 27 and 50 respectively during current movement to the Clyde and Etive areas. The decrease in salinity-corrected ¹³⁷Cs concentrations between the Clyde and Etive suggests that dilution by Atlantic water occurs, the latter mainly entering the Firth of Lorne from the west. The majority (～94%) of the radiocaesium supply to Loch Etive enters the Firth of Lorne via the portion of the coastal current circulating west of Islay, only ～6% arriving via the Sound of Jura.     

Recovering the initial conditions of our local Universe from NOG and PSCz catalogues

We apply the ztrace algorithm to the optical NOG and infrared PSC z galaxy catalogues to reconstruct the pattern of primordial fluctuations that have generated our local Universe. We check that the density fields traced by the two catalogues are well correlated, and consistent with a linear relation [either in δ or in  log (1 +δ)  ] with relative bias (of NOG with respect to PSC z )   b _rel= 1.1 ± 0.1  . The relative bias relation is used to fill the optical zone of avoidance at  | b | < 20°  using the PSC z galaxy density field.
We perform extensive testing on simulated galaxy catalogues to optimize the reconstruction. The quality of the reconstruction is predicted to be good at large scales, up to a limiting wavenumber   k _lim≃ 0.4 h Mpc⁻¹  beyond which all information is lost. We find that the improvement arising from the denser sampling of the optical catalogue is compensated by the uncertainties connected to the larger zone of avoidance.
The initial conditions reconstructed from the NOG catalogue are found (analogously to those from the PSC z ) to be consistent with a Gaussian paradigm. We use the reconstructions to produce sets of initial conditions ready to be used for constrained simulations of our local Universe.     

Cosmological constraints from Chandra X-ray observations of galaxy clusters

Chandra X-ray observations of rich, dynamically relaxed galaxy clusters allow the properties of the X-ray gas and the total gravitating mass to be determined precisely. Here, we discuss how Chandra observations may be used as a powerful tool for cosmological studies. By combining Chandra X-ray results on the X-ray gas mass fractions in clusters with independent measurements of the Hubble constant and the mean baryonic matter density of the universe, we obtain a tight constraint on the mean total matter density of the universe, Ο_m, and an interesting constraint on the cosmological constant, Ο_Λ. Using these results, together with the observed local X-ray luminosity function of the most X-ray luminous galaxy clusters, a mass-luminosity relation determined from Chandra and ROSAT X-ray data and weak gravitational lensing observations, and the mass function predicted by numerical simulations, we obtain a precise constraint on the normalization of the power spectrum of density fluctuations in the nearby universe,σ₈. We compare our results with those obtained from other, independent methods. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.