We present radio and gamma -ray observations, which, along with concurrent X-ray observations, reveal that the binary millisecond pulsar (MSP)/low-mass X-ray binary transition system PSR J1023+0038 ...has undergone a transformation in state. Whereas until recently the system harbored a bright millisecond radio pulsar, the radio pulsations at frequencies between 300 to 5000 MHz have now become undetectable. Concurrent with this radio disappearance, the gamma -ray flux of the system has quintupled. We conclude that, though the radio pulsar is currently not detectable, the pulsar mechanism is still active and the pulsar wind, as well as a newly formed accretion disk, are together providing the necessary conditions to create the gamma -ray increase. This system is the first example of a compact, low-mass binary which has shown significant state changes accompanied by large changes in gamma -ray flux; it will continue to provide an exceptional test bed for better understanding the formation of MSPs as well as accretion onto neutron stars in general.
ABSTRACT
Data Challenge 1 (DC1) is the first synthetic data set produced by the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). DC1 is designed to ...develop and validate data reduction and analysis and to study the impact of systematic effects that will affect the LSST data set. DC1 is comprised of r-band observations of 40 deg2 to 10 yr LSST depth. We present each stage of the simulation and analysis process: (a) generation, by synthesizing sources from cosmological N-body simulations in individual sensor-visit images with different observing conditions; (b) reduction using a development version of the LSST Science Pipelines; and (c) matching to the input cosmological catalogue for validation and testing. We verify that testable LSST requirements pass within the fidelity of DC1. We establish a selection procedure that produces a sufficiently clean extragalactic sample for clustering analyses and we discuss residual sample contamination, including contributions from inefficiency in star–galaxy separation and imperfect deblending. We compute the galaxy power spectrum on the simulated field and conclude that: (i) survey properties have an impact of 50 per cent of the statistical uncertainty for the scales and models used in DC1; (ii) a selection to eliminate artefacts in the catalogues is necessary to avoid biases in the measured clustering; and (iii) the presence of bright objects has a significant impact (2σ–6σ) in the estimated power spectra at small scales (ℓ > 1200), highlighting the impact of blending in studies at small angular scales in LSST.
The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) reported the first definitive GeV detections of the binaries LS I +61degrees303 and LS 5039 in the first year after its launch in 2008 June. These detections were ...unambiguous as a consequence of the reduced positional uncertainty and the detection of modulated gamma -ray emission on the corresponding orbital periods. An analysis of new data from the LAT, comprising 30 months of observations, identifies a change in the gamma -ray behavior of LS I +61degrees303. An increase in flux is detected in 2009 March and a steady decline in the orbital flux modulation is observed. Significant emission up to 30 GeV is detected by the LAT; prior data sets led to upper limits only. Contemporaneous TeV observations no longer detected the source, or found it-in one orbit-close to periastron, far from the phases at which the source previously appeared at TeV energies. The detailed numerical simulations and models that exist within the literature do not predict or explain many of these features now observed at GeV and TeV energies. New ideas and models are needed to fully explain and understand this behavior. A detailed phase-resolved analysis of the spectral characterization of LS I +61degrees303 in the GeV regime ascribes a power law with an exponential cutoff spectrum along each analyzed portion of the system's orbit. The on-source exposure of LS 5039 is also substantially increased with respect to our prior publication. In this case, whereas the general gamma -ray properties remain consistent, the increased statistics of the current data set allows for a deeper investigation of its orbital and spectral evolution.
The very high energy (VHE; >100 GeV) source HESS J0632+057 has been recently confirmed as a γ-ray binary, a subclass of the high-mass X-ray binary population, through the detection of an orbital ...period of 321 d. We performed a deep search for the emission of HESS J0632+057 in the GeV energy range using data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). The analysis was challenging due to the source being located in close proximity to the bright γ-ray pulsar PSR J0633+0632 and lying in a crowded region of the Galactic plane where there is prominent diffuse emission. We formulated a Bayesian block algorithm adapted to work with weighted photon counts, in order to define the off-pulse phases of PSR J0633+0632. A detailed spectral-spatial model of a 5° circular region centred on the known location of HESS J0632+057 was generated to accurately model the LAT data. No significant emission from the location of HESS J0632+057 was detected in the 0.1-100 GeV energy range integrating over ∼3.5 yr of data, with a 95 per cent flux upper limit of F
0.1-100 GeV < 3 × 10− 8 ph cm−2 s−1. A search for emission over different phases of the orbit also yielded no significant detection. A search for source emission on shorter time-scales (days-months) did not yield any significant detections. We also report the results of a search for radio pulsations using the 100-m Green Bank Telescope. No periodic signals or individual dispersed bursts of a likely astronomical origin were detected. We estimated the flux density limit of < 90/40 μJy at 2/9 GHz. The LAT flux upper limits combined with the detection of HESS J0632+057 in the 136-400 TeV energy band by the MAGIC collaboration imply that the VHE spectrum must turn over at energies <136 GeV placing constraints on any theoretical models invoked to explain the γ-ray emission.
The very high energy (VHE; >100 GeV) source HESS J0632+057 has been recently confirmed as a ...-ray binary, a subclass of the high-mass X-ray binary population, through the detection of an orbital ...period of 321 d. We performed a deep search for the emission of HESS J0632+057 in the GeV energy range using data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). The analysis was challenging due to the source being located in close proximity to the bright ...-ray pulsar PSR J0633+0632 and lying in a crowded region of the Galactic plane where there is prominent diffuse emission. We formulated a Bayesian block algorithm adapted to work with weighted photon counts, in order to define the off-pulse phases of PSR J0633+0632. A detailed spectral-spatial model of a 5... circular region centred on the known location of HESS J0632+057 was generated to accurately model the LAT data. No significant emission from the location of HESS J0632+057 was detected in the 0.1-100 GeV energy range integrating over ~3.5 yr of data, with a 95 per cent flux upper limit of F0.1-100 GeV < 3 x 10... ph cm... s... A search for emission over different phases of the orbit also yielded no significant detection. A search for source emission on shorter time-scales (days-months) did not yield any significant detections. We also report the results of a search for radio pulsations using the 100-m Green Bank Telescope. No periodic signals or individual dispersed bursts of a likely astronomical origin were detected. We estimated the flux density limit of < 90/40 ...Jy at 2/9 GHz. The LAT flux upper limits combined with the detection of HESS J0632+057 in the 136-400 TeV energy band by the MAGIC collaboration imply that the VHE spectrum must turn over at energies <136 GeV placing constraints on any theoretical models invoked to explain the ...-ray emission. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae/symbols omitted.)
The Data Handling Pipeline (“Pipeline”) has been developed for the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope (Fermi) Large Area Telescope (LAT) which launched in June 2008. Since then it has been in use to ...completely automate the production of data quality monitoring quantities, reconstruction and routine analysis of all data received from the satellite and to deliver science products to the collaboration and the Fermi Science Support Center. Aside from the reconstruction of raw data from the satellite (Level 1), data reprocessing and various event-level analyses are also reasonably heavy loads on the pipeline and computing resources. These other loads, unlike Level 1, can run continuously for weeks or months at a time. In addition it receives heavy use in performing production Monte Carlo tasks. In daily use it receives a new data download every 3 hours and launches about 2000 jobs to process each download, typically completing the processing of the data before the next download arrives. The need for manual intervention has been reduced to less than 0.01% of submitted jobs. The Pipeline software is written almost entirely in Java and comprises several modules. The software comprises web-services that allow online monitoring and provides charts summarizing work flow aspects and performance information. The server supports communication with several batch systems such as LSF and BQS and recently also Sun Grid Engine and Condor. This is accomplished through dedicated job control services that for Fermi are running at SLAC and the other computing site involved in this large scale framework, the Lyon computing center of IN2P3. While being different in the logic of a task, we evaluate a separate interface to the Dirac system in order to communicate with EGI sites to utilize Grid resources, using dedicated Grid optimized systems rather than developing our own. More recently the Pipeline and its associated data catalog have been generalized for use by other experiments, and are currently being used by the Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO), Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiments as well as for Monte Carlo simulations for the future Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA).
We present radio and γ-ray observations, which, along with concurrent X-ray observations, reveal that the binary millisecond pulsar (MSP)/low-mass X-ray binary transition system PSR J1023+0038 has ...undergone a transformation in state. Whereas until recently the system harbored a bright millisecond radio pulsar, the radio pulsations at frequencies between 300 to 5000 MHz have now become undetectable. Concurrent with this radio disappearance, the γ-ray flux of the system has quintupled. We conclude that, though the radio pulsar is currently not detectable, the pulsar mechanism is still active and the pulsar wind, as well as a newly formed accretion disk, are together providing the necessary conditions to create the γ-ray increase. This system is the first example of a compact, low-mass binary which has shown significant state changes accompanied by large changes in γ-ray flux; it will continue to provide an exceptional test bed for better understanding the formation of MSPs as well as accretion onto neutron stars in general.
Gamma-ray binaries are stellar systems for which the spectral energy distribution (discounting the thermal stellar emission) peaks at high energies. Detected from radio to TeV gamma rays, the ...gamma-ray binary LS I + 61 degrees 303 is highly variable across all frequencies. One aspect of this system's variability is the modulation of its emission with the timescale set by the similar to 26.4960 day orbital period. Here we show that, during the time of our observations, the gamma-ray emission of LS I + 61 degrees 303 also presents a sinusoidal variability consistent with the previously known superorbital period of 1667 days. This modulation is more prominently seen at orbital phases around apastron, whereas it does not introduce a visible change close to periastron. It is also found in the appearance and disappearance of variability at the orbital period in the power spectrum of the data. This behavior could be explained by a quasi-cyclical evolution of the equatorial outflow of the Be companion star, whose features influence the conditions for generating gamma rays. These findings open the possibility to use gamma-ray observations to study the outflows of massive stars in eccentric binary systems.
To describe the respiratory trajectories and their correlation with motor function in an international pediatric cohort of patients with type 2 and nonambulant type 3 spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).
...This was an 8-year retrospective observational study of patients in the International SMA Consortium (iSMAc) natural history study. We retrieved anthropometrics, forced vital capacity (FVC) absolute, FVC percent predicted (FVC%P), and noninvasive ventilation (NIV) requirement. Hammersmith Functional Motor Scale (HFMS) and revised Performance of Upper Limb (RULM) scores were correlated with respiratory function. We excluded patients in interventional clinical trials and on nusinersen commercial therapy.
There were 437 patients with SMA: 348 with type 2 and 89 with nonambulant type 3. Mean age at first visit was 6.9 (±4.4) and 11.1 (±4) years. In SMA type 2, FVC%P declined by 4.2%/y from 5 to 13 years, followed by a slower decline (1.0%/y). In type 3, FVC%P declined by 6.3%/y between 8 and 13 years, followed by a slower decline (0.9%/y). Thirty-nine percent with SMA type 2% and 9% with type 3 required NIV at a median age 5.0 (1.8-16.6) and 15.1 (13.8-16.3) years. Eighty-four percent with SMA type 2% and 80% with type 3 had scoliosis; 54% and 46% required surgery, which did not significantly affect respiratory decline. FVC%P positively correlated with HFMS and RULM scores in both subtypes.
In SMA type 2 and nonambulant type 3, lung function declines differently, with a common leveling after age 13 years. Lung and motor function correlated in both subtypes. Our data further define the milder SMA phenotypes and provide information to benchmark the long-term efficacy of new treatments for SMA.
PDF
