The second data release of the Gaia mission has revealed a very rich structure in local velocity space. In terms of in-plane motions, this rich structure is also seen as multiple ridges in the ...actions of the axisymmetric background potential of the Galaxy. These ridges are probably related to a combination of effects from ongoing phase-mixing and resonances from the spiral arms and the bar. We have recently developed a method for capturing the behaviour of the stellar phase-space distribution function at a resonance by re-expressing it in terms of a new set of canonical actions and angles variables valid in the resonant region. Here, by properly treating the distribution function at resonances, and by using a realistic model for a slowly rotating large Galactic bar with pattern speed Ωb = 39 km s−1 kpc−1, we show that no fewer than six ridges in local action space can be related to resonances with the bar. Two of these ridges at low angular momentum correspond to the corotation resonance, and can be associated with the Hercules moving group in local velocity space. Another ridge at high angular momentum corresponds to the outer Lindblad resonance, and can tentatively be associated with the velocity structure seen as an arch at high azimuthal velocities in Gaia data. The other ridges are associated with the 3:1, 4:1, and 6:1 resonances. The last can be associated with the so-called “horn” of the local velocity distribution. While it is clear that effects from spiral arms and incomplete phase-mixing related to external perturbations also play a role in shaping the complex kinematics revealed by Gaia data, the present work demonstrates that, contrary to common misconceptions, the bar alone can create multiple prominent ridges in velocity and action space.
Unidentified infrared emission bands are ubiquitous in many astronomical sources. These bands are widely, if not unanimously, attributed to collective emissions from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon ...(PAH) molecules, yet no single species of this class has been identified in space. Using spectral matched filtering of radio data from the Green Bank Telescope, we detected two nitrile-group-functionalized PAHs, 1- and 2-cyanonaphthalene, in the interstellar medium. Both bicyclic ring molecules were observed in the TMC-1 molecular cloud. In this paper, we discuss potential in situ gas-phase PAH formation pathways from smaller organic precursor molecules.
Wood-based products will play a pivotal role in the development of German bioeconomy regions. This transition in production patterns should develop sustainably without negative effects to the ...environment and society. Therefore, appropriate assessment tools are required to measure and document (un)sustainable aspects. The use of life cycle thinking enables the assessment of sustainability issues relating to such wood-based products. However, life cycle assessment approaches assessing sustainability implications from a regional perspective have not been fully developed yet. A regional perspective is especially required when assessing products’ social implications as they are determined by the national and regional socio-economic conditions. In a previous work, we established the “RESPONSA” framework (i.e. a REgional SPecific cONtextualised Social life cycle Assessment) to assess a product’s social performance from a regional perspective, directly accounting to the organisations behaviour and therefore providing specific information to support producers’ decision-making. This paper focuses on developing a set of social indices and related indicators applicable to wood-based production systems in Germany. This was done in four steps: 1) screening of global, German and wood related sustainability standards; 2) analysis of sLCA case studies; 3) conducting of stakeholder interviews. This allowed the preselection of social aspects relevant to the socio-economic context of interest (i.e. wood-based production chains in German bioeconomy regions). To set up the final set of social indices and indicators, the preselected sets of social aspects, in a fourth step, were further screened regarding their feasible implementation. The established set provides a starting point for assessing and monitoring social implications from wood-based production systems in a regional foreground.
•A set of social indices and indicators was established to assess wood-based production chains.•The four development steps are shown.•The set enables the assessment of a product’s social effects and directly relates to the conduct of associated organisations.•The set is part of a context-specific social life cycle assessment framework.
Non-axisymmetric components, such as spirals and central bars, play a major role in shaping galactic discs. An important aspect of the disc secular evolution driven by these perturbers is the radial ...migration of stars. It has been suggested recently that migration can populate a thick-disc component from inner-disc stars with high vertical energies. Since this has never been demonstrated in simulations, we study in detail the effect of radial migration on the disc velocity dispersion and disc thickness, by separating simulated stars into migrators and non-migrators. We apply this method to three isolated barred Tree-SPH N-body galaxies with strong radial migration. Contrary to expectations, we find that as stellar samples migrate, on the average, their velocity dispersion change (by as much as 50%) in such a way as to approximately match the non-migrating population at the radius at which they arrive. We show that, in fact, migrators suppress heating in parts of the disc. To confirm the validity of our findings, we also apply our technique to three cosmological re-simulations, which use a completely different simulation scheme and, remarkably, find very similar results. We believe the inability of migration to thicken discs is a fundamental property of internal disc evolution, irrespective of the migration mechanism at work. We explain this with the approximate conservation of the (average) vertical and radial actions rather than the energy. This “action mixing” can be used to constrain the migration rate in the Milky Way: estimates of the average vertical action in observations for different populations of stars should reveal flattening with radius for older groups of stars.
The SIFT operator's success for computer vision applications makes it an attractive alternative to the intricate feature based SAR image registration problem. The SIFT operator processing chain is ...capable of detecting and matching scale and affine invariant features. For SAR images, the operator is expected to detect stable features at lower scales where speckle influence diminishes. To adapt the operator performance to SAR images we analyse the impact of image filtering and of skipping features detected at the highest scales. We present our analysis based on multisensor, multitemporal and different viewpoint SAR images. The operator shows potential to become a robust alternative for point feature based registration of SAR images as subpixel registration consistency was achieved for most of the tested datasets. Our findings indicate that operator performance in terms of repeatability and matching capability is affected by an increase in acquisition differences within the imagery. We also show that the proposed adaptations result in a significant speed-up compared to the original SIFT operator.
Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) involving electrodes implanted into the human cerebral cortex have recently been developed in an attempt to restore function to profoundly paralyzed individuals. ...Current BMIs for restoring communication can provide important capabilities via a typing process, but unfortunately they are only capable of slow communication rates. In the current study we use a novel approach to speech restoration in which we decode continuous auditory parameters for a real-time speech synthesizer from neuronal activity in motor cortex during attempted speech.
Neural signals recorded by a Neurotrophic Electrode implanted in a speech-related region of the left precentral gyrus of a human volunteer suffering from locked-in syndrome, characterized by near-total paralysis with spared cognition, were transmitted wirelessly across the scalp and used to drive a speech synthesizer. A Kalman filter-based decoder translated the neural signals generated during attempted speech into continuous parameters for controlling a synthesizer that provided immediate (within 50 ms) auditory feedback of the decoded sound. Accuracy of the volunteer's vowel productions with the synthesizer improved quickly with practice, with a 25% improvement in average hit rate (from 45% to 70%) and 46% decrease in average endpoint error from the first to the last block of a three-vowel task.
Our results support the feasibility of neural prostheses that may have the potential to provide near-conversational synthetic speech output for individuals with severely impaired speech motor control. They also provide an initial glimpse into the functional properties of neurons in speech motor cortical areas.
We find that a steady-state bar induces transient features at low velocities in the solar neighbourhood velocity distribution due to the initial response of the disc, following the formation of the ...bar. We associate these velocity streams with two quasi-periodic orbital families, librating around the stable x1(1) and x1(2) orbits near the bar's outer Lindblad resonance. In a reference frame moving with the bar, these otherwise stationary orbits precess on a time-scale dependent on the strength of the bar, consistent with predictions from a simple Hamiltonian model for the resonance. This behaviour allows the two orbital families to reach the solar neighbourhood and manifest themselves as clumps in the u–v plane moving away from (x1(2)), and towards (x1(1)) the Galactic centre. Depending on the bar parameters and time since its formation, this model is consistent with the Pleiades and Coma Berenices, or Pleiades and Sirius moving groups seen in the Hipparcos stellar velocity distribution, if the Milky Way bar angle is 30°≲ϕ0≲ 45° and its pattern speed is Ωb/Ω0= 1.82 ± 0.07, where Ω0 is the angular velocity of the local standard of rest. Since the process is recurrent, we can achieve a good match about every six local standard of rest rotations. However, to be consistent with the fraction of stars in the Pleiades, we estimate that the Milky Way bar formed ∼2 Gyr ago. This model argues against a common dynamical origin for the Hyades and Pleiades moving groups.
We use data from the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) and the Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution (TGAS) catalogue to compute the velocity fields yielded by the radial (V-R), azimuthal (V-phi), and ...vertical (V-z) components of associated Galactocentric velocity. We search in particular for variation in all three velocity components with distance above and below the disc midplane, as well as how each component of V-z (line-of-sight and tangential velocity projections) modifies the obtained vertical structure. To study the dependence of velocity on proper motion and distance, we use two main samples: a RAVE sample including proper motions from the Tycho-2, PPMXL, and UCAC4 catalogues, and a RAVE-TGAS sample with inferred distances and proper motions from the TGAS and UCAC5 catalogues. In both samples, we identify asymmetries in V-R and V-z. Below the plane, we find the largest radial gradient to be partial derivative V-R/partial derivative R = -7.01 +/- 0.61 km s(-1) kpc(-1), in agreement with recent studies. Above the plane, we find a similar gradient with partial derivative V-R/partial derivative R = -9.42 +/- 1.77 km s(-1) kpc(-1). By comparing our results with previous studies, we find that the structure in V-z is strongly dependent on the adopted proper motions. Using the Galaxia Milky Way model, we demonstrate that distance uncertainties can create artificial wave-like patterns. In contrast to previous suggestions of a breathing mode seen in RAVE data, our results support a combination of bending and breathing modes, likely generated by a combination of external or internal and external mechanisms.
Using data from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) Observations of TMC-1: Hunting for Aromatic Molecules (GOTHAM) survey, we report the first astronomical detection of the C10H− anion. The astronomical ...observations also provided the necessary data to refine the spectroscopic parameters of C10H−. From the velocity stacked data and the matched filter response, C10H− is detected at >9σ confidence level at a column density of 4.04−2.23+10.67×1011 cm−2. A dedicated search for the C10H radical was also conducted toward TMC-1. In this case, the stacked molecular emission of C10H was detected at a ∼3.2σ confidence interval at a column density of 2.02−0.82+2.68×1011 cm−2. However, as the determined confidence level is currently <5σ, we consider the identification of C10H as tentative. The full GOTHAM data set was also used to better characterize the physical parameters including column density, excitation temperature, line width, and source size for the C4H, C6H, and C8H radicals and their respective anions, and the measured column densities were compared to the predictions from a gas/grain chemical formation model and from a machine learning analysis. Given the measured values, the C10H−/C10H column density ratio is ∼2.0−1.6+5.9—the highest value measured between an anion and neutral species to date. Such a high ratio is at odds with current theories for interstellar anion chemistry. For the radical species, both models can reproduce the measured abundances found from the survey; however, the machine learning analysis matches the detected anion abundances much better than the gas/grain chemical model, suggesting that the current understanding of the formation chemistry of molecular anions is still highly uncertain.
The second data release of the Gaia mission has revealed, in stellar velocity and action space, multiple ridges, the exact origin of which is still debated. Recently, we demonstrated that a large ...Galactic bar with pattern speed 39 km s−1 kpc−1 creates most of the observed ridges. Among these ridges, the Hercules moving group would then be associated with orbits trapped at the co-rotation resonance of the bar. Here we show that a distinctive prediction of such a model is that the angular momentum of Hercules at the Sun’s radius must significantly decrease with increasing Galactocentric azimuth (i.e. when getting closer to the major axis of the bar). We show that this dependence of the angular momentum of trapped orbits on the azimuth on the other hand does not happen close to the outer Lindblad resonance of a faster bar, unless the orbital distribution is still far from phase-mixed, namely for a bar perturbation younger than ∼2 Gyr. Using Gaia DR2 and Bayesian distances from the StarHorse code, and tracing the average Galactocentric radial velocity as a function of angular momentum and azimuth, we show that the Hercules angular momentum changes significantly with azimuth as expected for the co-rotation resonance of a dynamically old large bar.
PDF
