Interesting Astrophysics: Feb 16 to Feb 19

Another collection of interesting papers and preprints. Quite a lot of potentially interesting stuff this week, from the galaxy mass versus effective yield relationship at redshift z~3 to the effect of nearby historical supernova on Earth's atmosphere, along with tons of Spitzer observations of galaxies and AGN and a possible stellar disruption event.

I plan on doing a separate list of what I consider to be the most interesting White Papers submitted to the Astro2010 Decadal Survey and were also posted for public consumption on arXiv's astro-ph preprint service. I'll post that once it appears that posting of White Papers to arXiv is tailing off.

---

Galaxies and Starbursts

The present-day galaxy population in spiral galaxies
Reynier Peletier, arXiv:0902.2279 [ps, pdf, other]

Comments: 8 pages, Proceedings of 'Probing Stellar Populations out to the Distant Universe', Cefalu, Italy, Sep 7-19, 2008, AIP Conf. Proc. Series. Higher resolution version available at this http URL

Estimating the H I gas fractions of galaxies in the local Universe
Wei Zhang, Cheng Li, Guinevere Kauffmann, Hu Zou, Barbara Catinella, Shiyin Shen, Qi Guo, Ruixiang Chang, arXiv:0902.2392 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 11 pages, 8 figures, submitted for publication in MNRAS

Gas-poor galaxies do have higher gas-phase abundances than (less evolved) gas rich galaxies. Interesting. Compares to semi-analytic models, but the devil lies in the details of the recipe used for supernova feedback in the SAMs.

LSD: Lyman-break galaxies Stellar populations and Dynamics. I: Mass, metallicity and gas at z~3.1
F. Mannucci, G. Cresci, R. Maiolino, A. Marconi, G. Pastorini, L. Pozzetti, A. Gnerucci, G. Risaliti, R. Schneider, M. Lehnert, M. Salvati, arXiv:0902.2398 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: submitted to MNRAS

Surprisingly find that effective yields are lower in the more massive galaxies, and approach Solar at the low mass end of the sample. Unsurprisingly they end up requiring gas accretion to be more effective in the most massive galaxies in order to explain this. This is totally reversed from the local galaxy M-y_eff relationship. Is this consistent the other estimates of M-Z relationship at z > 2?

Physical conditions in the ISM of intensely star-forming galaxies at redshift~2
M. D. Lehnert, N. P. H. Nesvadba, L. Le Tiran, P. Di Matteo, W. van Driel, L. S. Douglas, L. Chemin, F. Bournaud, arXiv:0902.2784 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: ApJ accepted main journal, 21 pages, 12 figures

Bulges Of Nearby Galaxies With Spitzer: The Growth Of Pseudobulges In Disk Galaxies And Its Connection To Outer Disks
David B. Fisher, Niv Drory, Maximilian H. Fabricius, arXiv:0902.3258 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: Accepted to ApJ

From the abstract: "In almost all galaxies in our sample the specific SFR (SFR per unit stellar mass) of the bulge is higher than that of the outer disk, suggesting that almost all galaxies are increasing their B/T through internal star formation."

The First Galaxies: Signatures of the Initial Starburst
Jarrett L. Johnson, Thomas H. Greif, Volker Bromm, Ralf S. Klessen, Joseph Ippolito, arXiv:0902.3263 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 11 pages, 10 figures; to be submitted to MNRAS

The Radio Luminosity Function and Galaxy Evolution in the Coma Cluster
Neal A. Miller, Ann E. Hornschemeier, Bahram Mobasher, Terry J. Bridges, Michael J. Hudson, Ronald O. Marzke, Russell J. Smith, arXiv:0902.3388 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 45 pages with 13 figures, accepted for publication in AJ

---

Black Holes and AGN

Mass Outflow in the Seyfert 1 Galaxy NGC 5548
D.M. Crenshaw, S.B. Kraemer, H.R. Schmitt, J.S. Kaastra, N. Arav, J.R. Gabel, K.T. Korista, arXiv:0902.2310 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 39 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

AGN–starburst connection in NGC 7582: Gemini near-infrared spectrograph integral field unit observations (p 783-797)
Rogemar A. Riffel, Thaisa Storchi-Bergmann, Oli L. Dors Jr, Cláudia Winge, 2009, MNRAS, 393, 783
Full Text: HTML, PDF (Size: 3067K)

Resolving the mid-infrared cores of local Seyferts
P. Gandhi, H. Horst, A. Smette, S. Hoenig, A. Comastri, R. Gilli, C. Vignali, W. Duschl, arXiv:0902.2777 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

Spitzer spectra of Seyfert galaxies
Luigi Spinoglio, Silvia Tommasin, Matthew A. Malkan, Kevin Hainline, arXiv:0902.3341 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: to appear in the proceedings of "The Starburst-AGN Connection Conference", Shanghai, China, 27 Oct - 1 Nov 2008, ASP Conference Series

Mid-infrared spectroscopy of infrared-luminous galaxies at z~0.5-3
A. Hernan-Caballero, I. Perez-Fournon, E. Hatziminaoglou, A. Afonso-Luis, M. Rowan-Robinson, D. Rigopoulou, D. Farrah, C. J. Lonsdale, T. Babbedge, D. Clements, S. Serjeant, F. Pozzi, M. Vaccari, F. M. Montenegro-Montes, I. Valtchanov, E. Gonzalez-Solares, S. Oliver, D. Shupe, C. Gruppioni, B. Vila-Vilaro, C. Lari, F. La Franca, arXiv:0902.3369 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 32 pages, 24 figures, 15 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS

NTT, Spitzer and Chandra spectroscopy of SDSSJ095209.56+214313.3: the most luminous coronal-line supernova ever observed, or a stellar tidal disruption event ?
S. Komossa, H. Zhou, A. Rau, M. Dopita, A. Gal-Yam, J. Greiner, J. Zuther, M. Salvato, D. Xu, H. Lu, R. Saxton, M. Ajello, arXiv:0902.3248 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 18 pages, 8 (colour) figures; submitted to ApJ

---

X-rays

Spectral States and Evolution of Ultraluminous X-ray Sources
Hua Feng, Philip Kaaret, arXiv:0902.2607 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 17 pages, 9 tables, 10 figures, accepted by ApJ

---

Cosmology, in particular numerical cosmology

Probing recent star formation with absorption-line strengths in hierarchical models and observations
S.C. Trager, R.S. Somerville, arXiv:0902.2336 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 17 pages

Cosmological formation and chemical evolution of an elliptical galaxy
E. Colavitti, A. Pipino, F. Matteucci, arXiv:0902.2768 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication by A&A

---

Numerical Astrophysics and Hydrodynamics

Cosmological AMR MHD with Enzo
David C. Collins, Hao Xu, Michael L. Norman, Hui Li, Shengtai Li, arXiv:0902.2594 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 56 pages, 26 figures, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Suppliments

Galaxy Mergers with Adaptive Mesh Refinement: Star Formation and Hot Gas Outflow
Ji-hoon Kim, John H. Wise, Tom Abel, arXiv:0902.3001 [ps, pdf, other]

Comments: 4 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Image resolution greatly reduced, High-resolution version of this article and movies are available at this http URL

Interesting, but hardly deserves to be a Letter given that they're probably going to do a full paper as well.

---

Stars, Supernovae and Planets

An Antarctic ice core recording both supernovae and solar cycles
Yuko Motizuki, Kazuya Takahashi, Kazuo Makishima, Aya Bamba, Yoichi Nakai, Yasushige Yano, Makoto Igarashi, Hideaki Motoyama, Kokichi Kamiyama, Keisuke Suzuki, Takashi Imamura, arXiv:0902.3446 [pdf]
Comments: 18 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Nature

Pretty amazing stuff, although prior attempts at this sort of thing were not robust. From the text: "When a SN explodes close to the earth, the nuclear γ-rays produced (~0.1–1 MeV)
can lead to an enhancement of nitrogen oxide production in the middle atmosphere or
the stratosphere. SN events could therefore be traced in ice cores as NO₃^– concentration spikes."

The Secret XUV Lives of Cepheids: FUV/X-ray Observations of Polaris and beta Dor
Scott G. Engle, Edward F. Guinan, Joseph DePasquale, Nancy Evans, arXiv:0902.3449 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure, to appear in the proceedings of the "Future Directions in Ultraviolet Spectroscopy" Meeting - October 20-22, 2008; Annapolis, Maryland, USA

The Physical Properties of Red Supergiants
Emily M. Levesque, arXiv:0902.2789 [ps, pdf, other]
Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures; to appear in proceedings of "Hot and Cool: Bridging Gaps in Massive Star Evolution"