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At least 271 records · Page 15

A slippery slope: systematic uncertainties in the line width baryonic Tully-Fisher relation

The baryonic Tully–Fisher relation (BTFR) is both a valuable observational tool and a critical test of galaxy formation theory. We explore the systematic uncertainty in the slope and the scatter of the observed line-width BTFR utilizing homogeneously measured, unresolved H i observations for 930 isolated galaxies. We measure a fiducial relation of log{sub 10} M{sub baryon}=3.24 log{sub 10} V{sub rot} + 3.21 with observed scatter of 0.25 dex over a baryonic mass range of 10{sup 7.4} to 10{sup 11.3} M{sub ⊙} where V{sub rot} is measured from 20% H i line widths. We then conservatively vary the definitions of M{sub baryon} and V{sub rot}, the sample definition and the linear fitting algorithm. We obtain slopes ranging from 2.64 to 3.53 and scatter measurements ranging from 0.14 to 0.41 dex, indicating a significant systematic uncertainty of 0.25 in the BTFR slope derived from unresolved H i line widths. We next compare our fiducial slope to literature measurements, where reported slopes range from 3.0 to 4.3 and scatter is either unmeasured, immeasurable, or as large as 0.4 dex. Measurements derived from unresolved H i line widths tend to produce slopes of 3.3, while measurements derived strictly from resolved asymptotic rotation velocities tend to produce slopes of 3.9. The single largest factor affecting the BTFR slope is the definition of rotation velocity. The sample definition, the mass range and the linear fitting algorithm also significantly affect the measured BTFR. We find that galaxies in our sample with V{sub rot}<100 km s{sup −1} are consistent with the line-width BTFR of more massive galaxies, but these galaxies drive most of the observed scatter. It is critical when comparing predictions to an observed BTFR that the rotation velocity definition, the sample selection and the fitting algorithm are similarly defined. We recommend direct statistical comparisons between data sets with commensurable properties as opposed to simply comparing BTFR power-law fits.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Multicolor Variability of Young Stars in the Lagoon Nebula: Driving Causes and Intrinsic Timescales

Space observatories have provided unprecedented depictions of the many variability behaviors typical of low-mass, young stars. However, those studies have so far largely omitted more massive objects (~2 M {sub ⊙} to 4–5 M {sub ⊙}) and were limited by the absence of simultaneous, multiwavelength information. We present a new study of young star variability in the ~1–2 Myr old, massive Lagoon Nebula region. Our sample encompasses 278 young, late B to K-type stars, monitored with Kepler/K2. Auxiliary u, g, r, i, Hα time-series photometry, simultaneous with K2, was acquired at the Paranal Observatory. We employed this comprehensive data set and archival infrared photometry to determine individual stellar parameters, assess the presence of circumstellar disks, and tie the variability behaviors to inner disk dynamics. We found significant mass-dependent trends in variability properties, with B/A stars displaying substantially reduced levels of variability compared to G/K stars for any light-curve morphology. These properties suggest different magnetic field structures at the surface of early-type and later-type stars. We also detected a dearth of some disk-driven variability behaviors, particularly dippers, among stars earlier than G. This indicates that their higher surface temperatures and more chaotic magnetic fields prevent the formation and survival of inner disk dust structures corotating with the star. Finally, we examined the characteristic variability timescales within each light curve and determined that the day-to-week timescales are predominant over the K2 time series. These reflect distinct processes and locations in the inner disk environment, from intense accretion triggered by instabilities in the innermost disk regions to variable accretion efficiency in the outer magnetosphere.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Automatic analysis of stereoscopic satellite image pairs for determination of cloud-top height and structure

Results are presented on an automatic stereo analysis of cloud-top heights from nearly simultaneous satellite image pairs from the GOES and NOAA satellites, using a massively parallel processor computer. Comparisons of computer-derived height fields and manually analyzed fields show that the automatic analysis technique shows promise for performing routine stereo analysis in a real-time environment, providing a useful forecasting tool by augmenting observational data sets of severe thunderstorms and hurricanes. Simulations using synthetic stereo data show that it is possible to automatically resolve small-scale features such as 4000-m-diam clouds to about 1500 m in the vertical.

Hasler, A. F.↗

NANOGrav constraints on gravitational wave bursts with memory

Among efforts to detect gravitational radiation, pulsar timing arrays are uniquely poised to detect “memory” signatures, permanent perturbations in spacetime from highly energetic astrophysical events such as mergers of supermassive black hole binaries. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) observes dozens of the most stable millisecond pulsars using the Arecibo and Green Bank radio telescopes in an effort to study, among other things, gravitational wave memory. We herein present the results of a search for gravitational wave bursts with memory (BWMs) using the first five years of NANOGrav observations. We develop original methods for dramatically speeding up searches for BWM signals. In the directions of the sky where our sensitivity to BWMs is best, we would detect mergers of binaries with reduced masses of 10{sup 9} M{sub ⊙} out to distances of 30 Mpc; such massive mergers in the Virgo cluster would be marginally detectable. We find no evidence for BWMs. However, with our non-detection, we set upper limits on the rate at which BWMs of various amplitudes could have occurred during the time spanned by our data—e.g., BWMs with amplitudes greater than 10{sup −13} must encounter the Earth at a rate less than 1.5 yr{sup −1}.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

The Mira-Titan Universe. II. Matter Power Spectrum Emulation

We introduce a new cosmic emulator for the matter power spectrum covering eight cosmological parameters. Targeted at optical surveys, the emulator provides accurate predictions out to a wavenumber k ~ 5Mpc -1 and redshift z ≤ 2. Besides covering the standard set of CDM parameters, massive neutrinos and a dynamical dark energy of state are included. The emulator is built on a sample set of 36 cosmological models, carefully chosen to provide accurate predictions over the wide and large parameter space. For each model, we have performed a high-resolution simulation, augmented with sixteen medium-resolution simulations and TimeRG perturbation theory results to provide accurate coverage of a wide k-range; the dataset generated as part of this project is more than 1.2Pbyte. With the current set of simulated models, we achieve an accuracy of approximately 4%. Because the sampling approach used here has established convergence and error-control properties, follow-on results with more than a hundred cosmological models will soon achieve ~1% accuracy. We compare our approach with other prediction schemes that are based on halo model ideas and remapping approaches. The new emulator code is publicly available.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Boosts in leaf-level photosynthetic capacity aid Pinus ponderosa recovery from wildfire

Forests mitigate climate change by sequestering massive amounts of carbon, but recent increases in wildfire activity are threatening carbon storage. Currently, our understanding of wildfire impacts on forest resilience and the mechanisms controlling post-fire recovery remains unresolved due to a lack of empirical data on mature trees in natural settings. Here, we quantify the physiological mechanisms controlling carbon uptake immediately following wildfire in mature individuals of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), a wide-spread and canopy-dominant tree species in fire-prone forests. While photosynthetic capacity was lower in burned than unburned trees due to an overall depletion of resources, we show that within the burned trees, photosynthetic capacity increases with the severity of damage. Our data reveal that boosts in the efficiency of carbon uptake at the leaf-level may compensate for whole-tree damage, including the loss of leaf area and roots. We further show that heightened photosynthetic capacity in remaining needles on burned trees may be linked with reduced water stress and leaf nitrogen content, providing pivotal information about post-fire physiological processes. Our results have implications for Earth system modeling efforts because measurements of species-level physiological parameters are used in models to predict ecosystem and landscape-level carbon trajectories. Finally, current land management practices do not account for physiological resilience and recovery of severely burned trees. Our results suggest premature harvest may remove individuals that may otherwise survive, irrevocably altering forest carbon balance.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Linking transients to their host galaxies – II. A comparison of host galaxy properties and rate dependencies across supernova types

ABSTRACT We use the latest data set of supernova (SN) host galaxies to investigate how the host properties – stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR), metallicity, absolute magnitude, and colour–differ across SN types, with redshift-driven selection effects controlled. SN Ib and Ic host galaxies, on average, are more massive, metal-rich, and redder than SN II hosts. For subtypes, SN Ibn and Ic-BL have bluer hosts than their normal SN Ib and Ic siblings; SN IIb has consistent host properties with SN Ib, while hosts of SN IIn are more metal-rich than those of SN II. Hydrogen-deficient superluminous SNe feature bluer and lower luminosity hosts than most subtypes of core-collapse supernova (CC SN). Assuming simple proportionality of CC SN rates and host SFRs does not recover the observed mean host properties; either a population of long-lived progenitors or a metallicity-dependent SN production efficiency better reproduces the observed host properties. Assuming the latter case, the rates of SN II are insensitive to host metallicity, but the rates of SN Ib and Ic are substantially enhanced in metal-rich hosts by a factor of $\sim 10$ per dex increase in metallicity. Hosts of SN Ia are diverse in their observed properties; subtypes including SN Ia-91T, Ia-02cx, and Ia-CSM prefer star-forming hosts, while subtypes like SN Ia-91bg and Ca-rich prefer quiescent hosts. The rates of SN Ia-91T, Ia-02cx, and Ia-CSM are closely dependent on, or even proportional to, their host SFRs, indicating relatively short-lived progenitors. Conversely, the rates of SN Ia-91bg and Ca-rich transients are proportional to the total stellar mass, favouring long-lived progenitors.

Qin, Yu-Jing (ORCID:0000000336586026)↗

Parallel peak pruning for scalable SMP contour tree computation

As data sets grow to exascale, automated data analysis and visualisation are increasingly important, to intermediate human understanding and to reduce demands on disk storage via in situ analysis. Trends in architecture of high performance computing systems necessitate analysis algorithms to make effective use of combinations of massively multicore and distributed systems. One of the principal analytic tools is the contour tree, which analyses relationships between contours to identify features of more than local importance. Unfortunately, the predominant algorithms for computing the contour tree are explicitly serial, and founded on serial metaphors, which has limited the scalability of this form of analysis. While there is some work on distributed contour tree computation, and separately on hybrid GPU-CPU computation, there is no efficient algorithm with strong formal guarantees on performance allied with fast practical performance. Here in this paper, we report the first shared SMP algorithm for fully parallel contour tree computation, withfor-mal guarantees of O(lgnlgt) parallel steps and O(n lgn) work, and implementations with up to 10x parallel speed up in OpenMP and up to 50x speed up in NVIDIA Thrust.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Scalable Contour Tree Computation by Data Parallel Peak Pruning

As data sets grow to exascale, automated data analysis and visualization are increasingly important, to intermediate human understanding and to reduce demands on disk storage via in situ analysis. Trends in architecture of high performance computing systems necessitate analysis algorithms to make effective use of combinations of massively multicore and distributed systems. One of the principal analytic tools is the contour tree, which analyses relationships between contours to identify features of more than local importance. Unfortunately, the predominant algorithms for computing the contour tree are explicitly serial, and founded on serial metaphors, which has limited the scalability of this form of analysis. While there is some work on distributed contour tree computation, and separately on hybrid GPU-CPU computation, there is no efficient algorithm with strong formal guarantees on performance allied with fast practical performance. Furthermore, we report the first shared SMP algorithm for fully parallel contour tree computation, with formal guarantees of O(lg V lg t) parallel steps and O(V lg V) work for data with V samples and t contour tree supernodes, and implementations with more than 30× parallel speed up on both CPU using TBB and GPU using Thrust and up 70× speed up compared to the serial sweep and merge algorithm.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Understanding and Improving Energy Efficiency of Regional Mobility Systems Leveraging System-Level Data

Increased congestion required urban Americans to travel 6.8 billion hours more and purchase 3.1 billion gallons of fuel for a congestion cost of $\$$153 billion, according to the 2019 Urban Mobility Report. How to effectively manage the regional mobility system and improve the energy efficiency presents a big challenge to public agencies. Recent years have witnessed massive multi-jurisdictional multi-modal system-level data from various sources, which provides an unprecedented opportunity to improve the mobility system and its energy efficiency. However, implications of system-level data for mobility and energy efficiency are unclear. Those system-level data sets are siloed, spatially and temporally sparse, biased, not unified, and lacking of insights for system management. Consequently, there is a real need to acquire, fuse, mine and learn from multi-source system-level data to prepare public agencies to deal more effectively with large-scale energy efficiency modeling, management and planning. This project proposes to intensively review inexpensive, replicable and openly-accessible data from multi-modal systems, develop a data-driven system-level modeling framework enabled and validated by data, identify the energy inefficiencies of mobility systems from infrastructure, vehicles, passenger systems, and quantify the benefits of system-level strategies to improve mobility/energy efficiency. In addition, this research develops models to effectively estimate energy consumption and emissions from various types of vehicles on the roadway networks, with high granularity and high fidelity. Traditional models often heavily rely on aggregated infrastructure or vehicle/passenger data, for example, the census survey, land-use, and traffic counts of one or several classes, which may lead to research gaps considering the emerging vehicle technologies. Those models do not contain individual vehicular information. We propose an integrated data-driven method that combines multiple network modeling components, featuring the utilization of state-wide vehicle registration data. The additional vehicle registration data improve the model performance, and produce high-resolution vehicle-specific estimates of emissions and network performance metrics. Two case studies on the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia regional network show that the proposed method can efficiently and effectively estimate the emissions of a large-scale network, and provide valuable information for evaluating common management strategies.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

A Search for Early High-Energy Afterglows in BATSE Gamma-Ray Bursts

The scope of this project was to perform a detailed search for the early high-energy afterglow component of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in the BATSE GRB data archive. GRBs are believed to be the product of shock waves generated in a relativistic outflow from the demise of extremely massive stars and/or binary neutron star mergers. The outflow undeniably encounters the ambient medium of the progenitor object and another shock wave is set up. A forward shock propagates into the medium and a reverse shock propagates through the ejecta. This "external" shock dissipates the kinetic energy of the ejecta in the form of radiation via synchrotron losses and slows the outflow eventually to a non-relativistic state. Radiation from the forward external shock is therefore expected to be long-lived, lasting days, weeks, and even months. This radiation is referred to as the 'afterglow'.

Giblin, Timothy W.↗

Continuous mutual improvement of macromolecular structure models in the PDB and of X-ray crystallographic software: the dual role of deposited experimental data

Macromolecular structures deposited in the PDB can and should be continually reinterpreted and improved on the basis of their accompanying experimental X-ray data, exploiting the steady progress in methods and software that the deposition of such data into the PDB on a massive scale has made possible. Accurate crystal structures of macromolecules are of high importance in the biological and biomedical fields. Models of crystal structures in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) are in general of very high quality as deposited. However, methods for obtaining the best model of a macromolecular structure from a given set of experimental X-ray data continue to progress at a rapid pace, making it possible to improve most PDB entries after their deposition by re-analyzing the original deposited data with more recent software. This possibility represents a very significant departure from the situation that prevailed when the PDB was created, when it was envisioned as a cumulative repository of static contents. A radical paradigm shift for the PDB is therefore proposed, away from the static archive model towards a much more dynamic body of continuously improving results in symbiosis with continuously improving methods and software. These simultaneous improvements in methods and final results are made possible by the current deposition of processed crystallographic data (structure-factor amplitudes) and will be supported further by the deposition of raw data (diffraction images). It is argued that it is both desirable and feasible to carry out small-scale and large-scale efforts to make this paradigm shift a reality. Small-scale efforts would focus on optimizing structures that are of interest to specific investigators. Large-scale efforts would undertake a systematic re-optimization of all of the structures in the PDB, or alternatively the redetermination of groups of structures that are either related to or focused on specific questions. All of the resulting structures should be made generally available, along with the precursor entries, with various views of the structures being made available depending on the types of questions that users are interested in answering.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

Type Ibn Supernovae Show Photometric Homogeneity and Spectral Diversity at Maximum Light

Type Ibn supernovae (SNe) are a small yet intriguing class of explosions whose spectra are characterized by low-velocity helium emission lines with little to no evidence for hydrogen. The prevailing theory has been that these are the core-collapse explosions of very massive stars embedded in helium-rich circumstellar material (CSM). We report optical observations of six new SNe Ibn: PTF11rfh, PTF12ldy, iPTF14aki, iPTF15ul, SN 2015G, and iPTF15akq. This brings the sample size of such objects in the literature to 22. We also report new data, including a near-infrared spectrum, on the Type Ibn SN 2015U. In order to characterize the class as a whole, we analyze the photometric and spectroscopic properties of the full Type Ibn sample. We find that, despite the expectation that CSM interaction would generate a heterogeneous set of light curves, as seen in SNe IIn, most Type Ibn light curves are quite similar in shape, declining at rates around 0.1 mag day{sup −1} during the first month after maximum light, with a few significant exceptions. Early spectra of SNe Ibn come in at least two varieties, one that shows narrow P Cygni lines and another dominated by broader emission lines, both around maximum light, which may be an indication of differences in the state of the progenitor system at the time of explosion. Alternatively, the spectral diversity could arise from viewing-angle effects or merely from a lack of early spectroscopic coverage. Together, the relative light curve homogeneity and narrow spectral features suggest that the CSM consists of a spatially confined shell of helium surrounded by a less dense extended wind.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Montage electron tomography of vitrified specimens

Cryo-electron tomography provides detailed views of macromolecules in situ. However, imaging a large field of view to provide more cellular context requires reducing magnification during data collection, which in turn restricts the resolution. To circumvent this trade-off between field of view and resolution, we have developed a montage data collection scheme that uniformly distributes the dose throughout the specimen. In this approach, sets of slightly overlapping circular tiles are collected at high magnification and stitched to form a composite projection image at each tilt angle. These montage tilt-series are then reconstructed into massive tomograms with a small pixel size but a large field of view. For proof-of-principle, we applied this method to the thin edge of HeLa cells. Thon rings to better than 10 Å were detected in the montaged tilt-series, and diverse cellular features were observed in the resulting tomograms. These results indicate that the additional dose required by this technique is not prohibitive to performing structural analysis to intermediate resolution across a large field of view. We anticipate that montage tomography will prove particularly useful for lamellae, increase the likelihood of imaging rare cellular events, and facilitate visual proteomics.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

A Data-Driven Framework for Power System Event Type Identification via Safe Semi-Supervised Techniques

Herein this paper investigates the use of phasor measurement unit (PMU) data with deep learning techniques to construct real-time event identification models for transmission networks. Increasing penetration of distributed energy resources represents a great opportunity to achieve decarbonization, as well as challenges in systematic situational awareness. When high-resolution PMU data and sufficient manually recorded event labels are available, the power event identification problem is defined as a statistical classification problem that can be solved by numerous cutting-edge classifiers. However, in real grids, collecting tremendous high-quality event labels is quite expensive. Utilities frequently have a large number of event records without in-depth details (i.e., unlabeled events). To bridge this gap, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning-based method to improve the performance of event classifiers trained with a limited number of labeled events by exploiting the information from massive unlabeled events. In other words, compared to existing data-driven methods, our method requires only a small portion of labeled data to achieve a similar level of accuracy. Meanwhile, this work discusses and addresses the performance degradation caused by class distribution mismatch between the training set and the real applications. Based on the proposed safe learning mechanism, our model does not directly use all unlabeled events during model training, but selectively uses them through a comprehensive evaluation procedure. Numerical studies on a sizable PMU dataset have been used to validate the performance of the proposed method.

42 ENGINEERING↗

A correlation

The paper reports on some correlative features of two sets of space-based atmospheric measurements which are globally distributed with good statistical coverage. One set of data, pertaining to tropospheric processes, is lightning occurrence frequency derived from measurements aboard the DMSP satellite. The second set of data, pertaining to thermospheric processes, is the occurrence frequency of wavelike structures in neutral atmospheric density profiles derived from measurements aboard AE-C and AE-D. A significant correlation was found between the occurrence patterns of dawn lightning, which is indicative of massive long-lived tropospheric convective activity, and the occurrence patterns of wavelike structures in the thermosphere.

Source record↗

THE COS/UVES ABSORPTION SURVEY OF THE MAGELLANIC STREAM. II. EVIDENCE FOR A COMPLEX ENRICHMENT HISTORY OF THE STREAM FROM THE FAIRALL 9 SIGHTLINE

We present a multi-wavelength study of the Magellanic Stream (MS), a massive gaseous structure in the Local Group that is believed to represent material stripped from the Magellanic Clouds. We use ultraviolet, optical and radio data obtained with HST/COS, VLT/UVES, FUSE, GASS, and ATCA to study metal abundances and physical conditions in the Stream toward the quasar Fairall 9. Line absorption in the MS from a large number of metal ions and from molecular hydrogen is detected in up to seven absorption components, indicating the presence of multi-phase gas. From the analysis of unsaturated S II absorption, in combination with a detailed photoionization model, we obtain a surprisingly high {alpha} abundance in the Stream toward Fairall 9 of [S/H] = -0.30 {+-} 0.04 (0.50 solar). This value is five times higher than what is found along other MS sightlines based on similar COS/UVES data sets. In contrast, the measured nitrogen abundance is found to be substantially lower ([N/H] = -1.15 {+-} 0.06), implying a very low [N/{alpha}] ratio of -0.85 dex. The substantial differences in the chemical composition of MS toward Fairall 9 compared to other sightlines point toward a complex enrichment history of the Stream. We favor a scenario, in which the gas toward Fairall 9 was locally enriched with {alpha} elements by massive stars and then was separated from the Magellanic Clouds before the delayed nitrogen enrichment from intermediate-mass stars could set in. Our results support (but do not require) the idea that there is a metal-enriched filament in the Stream toward Fairall 9 that originates in the LMC.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

SHARP: a distributed GPU-based ptychographic solver

Ever brighter light sources, fast parallel detectors and advances in phase retrieval methods have made ptychography a practical and popular imaging technique. Compared to previous techniques, ptychography provides superior robustness and resolution at the expense of more advanced and time-consuming data analysis. Therefore, by taking advantage of massively parallel architectures, high-throughput processing can expedite this analysis and provide microscopists with immediate feedback. These advances allow real-time imaging at wavelength-limited resolution, coupled with a large field of view. This article describes a set of algorithmic and computational methodologies used at the Advanced Light Source and US Department of Energy light sources. These are packaged as a CUDA-based software environment named SHARP, aimed at providing state-of-the-art high-throughput ptychography reconstructions for the coming era of diffraction-limited light sources.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗