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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 145 records · Page 8
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Near-infrared Census of RR Lyrae Variables in the Messier 3 Globular Cluster and the Period–Luminosity Relations

We present new near-infrared (NIR), JHK {sub s}, time-series observations of RR Lyrae variables in the Messier 3 (NGC 5272) globular cluster using the WIRCam instrument at the 3.6 m Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope. Our observations cover a sky area of ∼21′ × 21′ around the cluster center and provide an average of 20 epochs of homogeneous JHK {sub s}-band photometry. New homogeneous photometry is used to estimate robust mean magnitudes for 175 fundamental-mode (RRab), 47 overtone-mode (RRc), and 11 mixed-mode (RRd) variables. Our sample of 233 RR Lyrae variables is the largest thus far obtained in a single cluster with time-resolved, multiband NIR photometry. NIR-to-optical amplitude ratios for RR Lyrae in Messier 3 exhibit a systematic increase moving from RRc to short-period (P < 0.6 day) and long-period (P ≳ 0.6 day) RRab variables. We derive JHK {sub s}-band period–luminosity relations for RRab, RRc, and the combined sample of variables. Absolute calibrations based on the theoretically predicted period–luminosity–metallicity relations for RR Lyrae stars yield a distance modulus, μ=15.041±0.017 (statistical)±0.036 (systematic) mag, to Messier 3. When anchored to trigonometric parallaxes for nearby RR Lyrae stars from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gaia mission, our distance estimates are consistent with those resulting from the theoretical calibrations, albeit with relatively larger systematic uncertainties.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Mildly Hierarchical Triple Dynamics and Applications to the Outer Solar System

Three-body interactions are ubiquitous in astrophysics. For instance, Kozai–Lidov oscillations in hierarchical triple systems have been studied extensively and applied to a wide range of astrophysical systems. However, mildly hierarchical triples also play an important role, but they are less explored. In this work, we consider the secular dynamics of a test particle in a mildly hierarchical configuration. We find the limit within which the secular approximation is reliable when the outer perturber is in a circular orbit. In addition, we present resonances and chaotic regions using surface-of-section plots, and characterize regions of phase space that allow large eccentricity and inclination variations. Finally, we apply the secular results to the outer Solar System. We focus on the distribution of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (eTNOs) under the perturbation of a possible outer planet (Planet 9), and find that in addition to a low-inclination Planet 9, a polar or a counter-orbiting one could also produce pericenter clustering of eTNOs, while the polar one leads to a wider spread of eTNO inclinations.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2021

Efficient Nonthermal Ion and Electron Acceleration Enabled by the Flux-Rope Kink Instability in 3D Nonrelativistic Magnetic Reconnection

The relaxation of field-line tension during magnetic reconnection gives rise to a universal Fermi acceleration process involving the curvature drift of particles. However, the efficiency of this mechanism is limited by the trapping of energetic particles within flux ropes. Using 3D fully kinetic simulations, we demonstrate that the flux-rope kink instability leads to strong field-line chaos in weak-guide-field regimes where the Fermi mechanism is most efficient, thus allowing particles to transport out of flux ropes and undergo further acceleration. As a consequence, both ions and electrons develop clear power-law energy spectra that contain a significant fraction of the released energy. The low-energy bounds are determined by the injection physics, while the high-energy cutoffs are limited only by the system size. Furthermore, these results have strong relevance to observations of nonthermal particle acceleration in space and astrophysics.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Very-Low-Frequency transmitters bifurcate energetic electron belt in near-earth space

Very-Low-Frequency (VLF) transmitters operate worldwide mostly at frequencies of 10–30 kilohertz for submarine communications. While it has been of intense scientific interest and practical importance to understand whether VLF transmitters can affect the natural environment of charged energetic particles, for decades there remained little direct observational evidence that revealed the effects of these VLF transmitters in geospace. Here we report a radially bifurcated electron belt formation at energies of tens of kiloelectron volts (keV) at altitudes of ~0.8–1.5 Earth radii on timescales over 10 days. Using Fokker-Planck diffusion simulations, we provide quantitative evidence that VLF transmitter emissions that leak from the Earth-ionosphere waveguide are primarily responsible for bifurcating the energetic electron belt, which typically exhibits a single-peak radial structure in near-Earth space. Since energetic electrons pose a potential danger to satellite operations, our findings demonstrate the feasibility of mitigation of natural particle radiation environment.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Star-exoplanet interactions: A growing interdisciplinary field in heliophysics

Traditionally, heliophysics is characterized as the study of the near-Earth space environment, where plasmas and neutral gases originating from the Earth, the Sun, and other solar system bodies interact in ways that are detectable only through in-situ or close-range (usually within ~10 AU) remote sensing. As a result, heliophysics has data from the space environment around a handful of solar system objects, in particular the Sun and Earth. Comparatively, astrophysics has data from an extensive array of objects, but is more limited in temporal, spatial, and wavelength information from any individual object. Thus, our understanding of planetary space environments as a complex, multi-dimensional network of specific interacting systems may in the past have seemed to have little to do with the highly diverse space environments detected through astrophysical methods. Recent technological advances have begun to bridge this divide. Exoplanetary studies are opening up avenues to study planetary environments beyond our solar system, with missions like Kepler, TESS, and JWST, along with increasing capabilities of ground-based observations. At the same time, heliophysics studies are pushing beyond the boundaries of our heliosphere with Voyager, IBEX, and the future IMAP mission. The interdisciplinary field of star-exoplanet interactions is a critical, growing area of study that enriches heliophysics. A multidisciplinary approach to heliophysics enables us to better understand universal processes that operate in diverse environments, as well as the evolution of our solar system and extreme space weather. The expertise, data, theory, and modeling tools developed by heliophysicists are crucial in understanding the space environments of exoplanets, their host stars, and their potential habitability. The mutual benefit that heliophysics and exoplanetary studies offer each other depends on strong, continuing solar system-focused and Earth-focused heliophysics studies. The heliophysics discipline requires new targeted funding to support inter-divisional opportunities, including small multi-disciplinary research projects, large collaborative research teams, and observations targeting the heliophysics of planetary and exoplanet systems. Here we discuss areas of heliophysics-relevant exoplanetary research, observational opportunities and challenges, and ways to promote the inclusion of heliophysics within the wider exoplanetary community.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

PSF–NET: A Nonparametric Point-spread Function Model for Ground-based Optical Telescopes

Ground-based optical telescopes are seriously affected by atmospheric turbulence induced aberrations. Understanding properties of these aberrations is important both for instrument design and image restoration method development. Because the point-spread function can reflect performance of the whole optic system, it is appropriate to use the point-spread function to describe atmospheric turbulence induced aberrations. Assuming point-spread functions induced by the atmospheric turbulence with the same profile belong to the same manifold space, we propose a nonparametric point-spread function—PSF–NET. The PSF–NET has a cycle convolutional neural network structure and is a statistical representation of the manifold space of PSFs induced by the atmospheric turbulence with the same profile. Testing the PSF–NET with simulated and real observation data, we find that a well trained PSF–NET can restore any short exposure images blurred by atmospheric turbulence with the same profile. Besides, we further use the impulse response of the PSF–NET, which can be viewed as the statistical mean PSF, to analyze interpretation properties of the PSF–NET. We find that variations of statistical mean PSFs are caused by variations of the atmospheric turbulence profile: as the difference of the atmospheric turbulence profile increases, the difference between statistical mean PSFs also increases. The PSF–NET proposed in this paper provides a new way to analyze atmospheric turbulence induced aberrations, which would benefit the development of new observation methods for ground-based optical telescopes.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Islands in de Sitter space

We consider black holes in 2d de Sitter JT gravity coupled to a CFT, and entangled with matter in a disjoint non-gravitating universe. Tracing out the entangling matter leaves the CFT in a density matrix whose stress tensor backreacts on the de Sitter geometry, lengthening the wormhole behind the black hole horizon. Naively, the entropy of the entangling matter increases without bound as the strength of the entanglement increases, but the monogamy property predicts that this growth must level off. We compute the entropy via the replica trick, including wormholes between the replica copies of the de Sitter geometry, and find a competition between conventional field theory entanglement entropy and the surface area of extremal “islands” in the de Sitter geometry. The black hole and cosmological horizons both play a role in generating such islands in the backreacted geometry, and have the effect of stabilizing the entropy growth as required by monogamy. We first show this in a scenario in which the de Sitter spatial section has been decompactified to an interval. Then we consider the compact geometry, and argue for a novel interpretation of the island formula in the context of closed universes that recovers the Page curve. Finally, we comment on the application of our construction to the cosmological horizon in empty de Sitter space.

2D gravity↗
DOE OSTI2024

ATAT: Astronomical Transformer for time series and Tabular data

Context. The advent of next-generation survey instruments, such as theVera C. RubinObservatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), is opening a window for new research in time-domain astronomy. The Extended LSST Astronomical Time-Series Classification Challenge (ELAsTiCC) was created to test the capacity of brokers to deal with a simulated LSST stream. Aims. Our aim is to develop a next-generation model for the classification of variable astronomical objects. We describe ATAT, the Astronomical Transformer for time series And Tabular data, a classification model conceived by the ALeRCE alert broker to classify light curves from next-generation alert streams. ATAT was tested in production during the first round of the ELAsTiCC campaigns. Methods. ATAT consists of two transformer models that encode light curves and features using novel time modulation and quantile feature tokenizer mechanisms, respectively. ATAT was trained on different combinations of light curves, metadata, and features calculated over the light curves. We compare ATAT against the current ALeRCE classifier, a balanced hierarchical random forest (BHRF) trained on human-engineered features derived from light curves and metadata. Results. When trained on light curves and metadata, ATAT achieves a macro F1 score of 82.9 ± 0.4 in 20 classes, outperforming the BHRF model trained on 429 features, which achieves a macro F1 score of 79.4 ± 0.1. Conclusions. The use of transformer multimodal architectures, combining light curves and tabular data, opens new possibilities for classifying alerts from a new generation of large etendue telescopes, such as theVera C. RubinObservatory, in real-world brokering scenarios.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2023

Non-parametric Lagrangian biasing from the insights of neural nets

We present a Lagrangian model of galaxy clustering bias in which we train a neural net using the local properties of the smoothed initial density field to predict the late-time mass-weighted halo field.By fitting the mass-weighted halo field in the AbacusSummit simulations at z = 0.5, we find that including three coarsely spaced smoothing scales gives the best recovery of the halo power spectrum. Adding more smoothing scales may lead to 2–5% underestimation of the large-scale power and can cause the neural net to overfit.We find that the fitted halo-to-mass ratio can be well described by two directions in the original high-dimension feature space.Projecting the original features into these two principal components and re-training the neural net either reproduces the original training result, or outperforms it with a better match of the halo power spectrum. The elements of the principal components are unlikely to be assigned physical meanings, partly owing to the features being highly correlated between different smoothing scales.Our work illustrates a potential need to include multiple smoothing scales when studying galaxy bias, and this can be done easily with machine-learning methods that can take in high dimensional input feature space.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Wide-angle effects for peculiar velocities

ABSTRACT The line-of-sight peculiar velocities of galaxies contribute to their observed redshifts, breaking the translational invariance of galaxy clustering down to a rotational invariance around the observer. This becomes important when the line-of-sight direction varies significantly across a survey, leading to what are known as ‘wide-angle’ effects in redshift-space distortions. Wide-angle effects will also be present in measurements of the momentum field, i.e. the galaxy density-weighted velocity field, in upcoming peculiar velocity surveys. In this work, we study how wide-angle effects modify the predicted correlation function and power spectrum for momentum statistics, both in autocorrelation and in cross-correlation with the density field. Using both linear theory and the Zel'dovich approximation, we find that deviations from the plane-parallel limit are large and could become important in data analysis for low-redshift surveys. We point out that even multipoles in the cross-correlation between density and momentum are non-zero regardless of the choice of line of sight, and therefore contain new cosmological information that could be exploited. We discuss configuration space, Fourier space, and spherical analyses; providing exact expressions in each case rather than relying on an expansion in small angles. We hope these expressions will be of use in the analysis of upcoming surveys for redshift-space distortions and peculiar velocities.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Absolute timing calibration of the Resolve microcalorimeter spectrometer on the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission

The Resolve microcalorimeter spectrometer on the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) is designed to have a good timing capability with the mission-level requirement of 1 ms as the absolute time tagging accuracy to suffice the needs for observatory science. In the ground calibration campaign, the absolute and relative timing offsets were measured using pulsed X-rays from the modulated X-ray sources. These offsets were used to determine calibration parameters, the Resolve timing coefficients, which are used in the offline correction of event times. In the orbit, reevaluation of the timing coefficients was carried out using the Crab pulsar, which was observed in two periods, one in the performance verification phase and the other in the guest observation phase. We report the absolute timing calibration of XRISM/Resolve using the ground and in-orbit data. Although the requirement is likely satisfied with the ground parameters, the timing coefficients have been refined using the in-orbit calibration to improve the timing accuracy. In addition, for the first time, we present the interpretation of the absolute timing offset originating from the analog and digital processing of X-ray events unique to a microcalorimeter spectrometer and present a complete view of the timing error of the Resolve instrument.

Astronomy and AstroPhysics↗
DOE OSTI2020

When the Moon had a magnetosphere

Apollo lunar samples reveal that the Moon generated its own global magnetosphere, lasting from ~4.25 to ~2.5 billion years (Ga) ago. At peak lunar magnetic intensity (4 Ga ago), the Moon was volcanically active, likely generating a very tenuous atmosphere, and, it is believed, was at a geocentric distance of ~18 Earth radii (R E ). Solar storms strip a planet’s atmosphere over time, and only a strong magnetosphere would be able to provide maximum protection. We present simplified magnetic dipole field modeling confined within a paraboloidal-shaped magnetopause to show how the expected Earth-Moon coupled magnetospheres provide a substantial buffer from the expected intense solar wind, reducing Earth’s atmospheric loss to space.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Impact of Dark Photon Emission on Massive Star Evolution and Pre-supernova Neutrino Signal

Abstract We study the effects of additional cooling due to the emission of a dark matter candidate particle, the dark photon, on the final phases of the evolution of a 15 M ⊙ star and resulting modifications of the pre-supernova neutrino signal. For a substantial portion of the dark photon parameter space the extra cooling speeds up Si burning, which results in a reduced number of neutrinos emitted during the last day before core collapse. This reduction can be described by a systematic acceleration of the relevant timescales and the results can be estimated semi-analytically in good agreement with the numerical simulations. Outside the semi-analytic regime we find more complicated effects. In a narrow parameter range, low-mass dark photons lead to an increase in the number of emitted neutrinos because of additional shell-burning episodes that delay core collapse. Furthermore, relatively strong couplings produce a thermonuclear runaway during O burning, which could result in a complete disruption of the star but requires more detailed simulations to determine the outcome. Our results show that pre-supernova neutrino signals are a potential probe of the dark photon parameter space.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2020

Endogenic and Exogenic Contributions to Visible-wavelength Spectra of Europa’s Trailing Hemisphere

The composition of Europa’s trailing hemisphere reflects the combined influences of endogenous geologic resurfacing and exogenous sulfur radiolysis. Using spatially resolved visible-wavelength spectra of Europa obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, we map multiple spectral features across the trailing hemisphere and compare their geographies with the distributions of large-scale geology, magnetospheric bombardment, and surface color. Based on such comparisons, we interpret some aspects of our spectra as indicative of purely exogenous sulfur radiolysis products and other aspects as indicative of radiolysis products formed from a mixture of endogenous material and magnetospheric sulfur. The spatial distributions of two of the absorptions seen in our spectra—a widespread downturn toward the near-UV and a distinct feature at 530 nm—appear consistent with sulfur allotropes previously suggested from ground-based spectrophotometry. However, the geographies of two additional features—an absorption feature at 360 nm and the spectral slope at red wavelengths—are more consistent with endogenous material that has been altered by sulfur radiolysis. We suggest irradiated sulfate salts as potential candidates for this material, but we are unable to identify particular species with the available data.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

New Candidates for Planetary-mass Brown Dwarfs in IC 348

We have used infrared images obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 on board the Hubble Space Telescope to search for planetary-mass brown dwarfs in the star-forming cluster IC 348. In those images, we have identified 12 objects that have colors indicative of spectral types later than M8, corresponding to masses of ≲30 M {sub Jup} at the age of IC 348. The four brightest candidates have been observed with spectroscopy, all of which are confirmed to have late types. Two of those candidates appear to be young, and thus are likely members of the cluster, while the ages and membership of the other two candidates are uncertain. One of the former candidates is the faintest known member of IC 348 in extinction-corrected K {sub s} and is expected to have a mass of 4–5 M {sub Jup} based on evolutionary models and an assumed age of 3 Myr. Four of the remaining eight candidates have ground-based photometry that further supports their candidacy as brown dwarfs, some of which are fainter (and potentially less massive) than the known members.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗