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Register a new userReal-time detection of an extreme scattering event: constraints on Galactic plasma lenses
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Extreme scattering events (ESEs) are distinctive fluctuations in the brightness of astronomical radio sources caused by occulting plasma lenses in the interstellar medium. The inferred plasma pressures of the lenses are $sim 10^3$ times the ambient pressure, challenging our understanding of gas conditions in the Milky Way. Using a new survey technique, we have discovered an ESE while it was in progress. We report radio and optical follow-up observations. Modelling of the radio data demonstrates that the lensing structure is a density enhancement and that the lens is diverging, ruling out one of two competing physical models. Our technique will uncover many more ESEs, addressing a long-standing mystery of the small-scale gas structure of the Galaxy.
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We report the discovery of an extreme X-ray flux rise (by a factor of > 20) of the weak-line quasar SDSS J153913.47+395423.4 (hereafter SDSS J1539+3954) at z = 1.935. SDSS J1539+3954 is the most-luminous object among radio-quiet type 1 AGNs where such dramatic X-ray variability has been observed. Before the X-ray flux rise, SDSS J1539+3954 appeared X-ray weak compared with the expectation from its UV flux; after the rise, the ratio of its X-ray flux and UV flux is consistent with the majority of the AGN population. We also present a contemporaneous HET spectrum of SDSS J1539+3954, which demonstrates that its UV continuum level remains generally unchanged despite the dramatic increase in the X-ray flux, and its C iv emission line remains weak. The dramatic change only observed in the X-ray flux is consistent with a shielding model, where a thick inner accretion disk can block our line of sight to the central X-ray source. This thick inner accretion disk can also block the nuclear ionizing photons from reaching the high-ionization broad emission-line region, so that weak high-ionization emission lines are observed. Under this scenario, the extreme X-ray variability event may be caused by slight variations in the thickness of the disk. This event might also be explained by gravitational light-bending effects in a reflection model.
Plasma lensing is the refraction of low-frequency electromagnetic rays due to free electrons in the interstellar medium. Although the phenomenon has a distinct similarity to gravitational lensing, particularly in its mathematical description, plasma lensing introduces other additional features, such as wavelength dependence, radial rather than tangential image distortions, and strong demagnification of background sources. Axisymmetrical models of plasma lenses have been well-studied in the literature, but density distributions with more complicated shapes can provide new and exotic image configurations and increase the richness of the magnification properties. As a first step towards non-axisymmetrical distributions, we study two families of elliptical plasma lens, softened power-law and exponential plasma distributions. We perform numerical studies on each lens model, and present them over a parameter space. In addition to deriving elliptical plasma lens formulae, we also investigate the number of critical curves that the lens can produce by studying the lens parameter space, in particular the dependence on the lensing ellipticity. We find that the introduction of ellipticity into the plasma distribution can enhance the lensing effects as well as the complexity of the magnification map.
I describe two novel techniques originally devised to select strongly lensed quasar candidates in wide-field surveys. The first relies on outlier selection in optical and mid-infrared magnitude space; the second combines mid-infrared colour selection with GAIA spatial resolution, to identify multiplets of objects with quasar-like colours. Both methods have already been applied successfully to the SDSS, ATLAS and DES footprints: besides recovering known lenses from previous searches, they have led to new discoveries, including quadruply lensed quasars, which are rare within the rare-object class of quasar lenses. As a serendipitous by-product, at least four candidate Galactic streams in the South have been identified among foreground contaminants. There is considerable scope for tailoring the WISE-GAIA multiplet search to stellar-like objects, instead of quasar-like, and to automatically detect Galactic streams.
A key challenge in mining social media data streams is to identify events which are actively discussed by a group of people in a specific local or global area. Such events are useful for early warning for accident, protest, election or breaking news. However, neither the list of events nor the resolution of both event time and space is fixed or known beforehand. In this work, we propose an online spatio-temporal event detection system using social media that is able to detect events at different time and space resolutions. First, to address the challenge related to the unknown spatial resolution of events, a quad-tree method is exploited in order to split the geographical space into multiscale regions based on the density of social media data. Then, a statistical unsupervised approach is performed that involves Poisson distribution and a smoothing method for highlighting regions with unexpected density of social posts. Further, event duration is precisely estimated by merging events happening in the same region at consecutive time intervals. A post processing stage is introduced to filter out events that are spam, fake or wrong. Finally, we incorporate simple semantics by using social media entities to assess the integrity, and accuracy of detected events. The proposed method is evaluated using different social media datasets: Twitter and Flickr for different cities: Melbourne, London, Paris and New York. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compare our results with two baseline algorithms based on fixed split of geographical space and clustering method. For performance evaluation, we manually compute recall and precision. We also propose a new quality measure named strength index, which automatically measures how accurate the reported event is.
We undertake a statistical analysis of the radial abundance distributions in the Galactic disk within a theoretical framework for Galactic chemical evolution which incorporates the influence of spiral arms. 1) The mean mass of oxygen ejected per core-collapse SNe (CC SNe) event (which are concentrated within spiral arms) is $sim$0.27 M$_{odot}$; 2) the mean mass of iron ejected by `tardy Type Ia SNe (SNeIa; progenitors of whom are older/longer-lived stars with ages $simgt$100 Myr and up to several Gyr, which do not concentrate within spiral arms) is $sim$0.58 M$_{odot}$; 3) the upper mass of iron ejected by prompt SNeIa (SNe whose progenitors are younger/shorter-lived stars with ages $simlt$100 Myr, which are concentrated within spiral arms) is $leq$0.23 M$_{odot}$ per event; 4) the corresponding mean mass of iron produced by CC SNe is $leq$0.04 M$_{odot}$ per event; (v) short-lived SNe (core-collapse or prompt SNeIa) supply $sim$85% of the Galactic disks iron. The inferred low mean mass of oxygen ejected per CC SNe event implies a low upper mass limit for the corresponding progenitors of $sim$23 M$_{odot}$, otherwise the Galactic disk would be overabundant in oxygen. The low mean mass of iron ejected by prompt SNeIa, relative to the mass produced by tardy SNeIa ($sim$2.5 times lower), prejudices the idea that both sub-populations of SNeIa have the same physical nature. We suggest that, perhaps, prompt SNeIa are more akin to CC SNe, and discuss the implications of such a suggestion.
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