No Arabic abstract
We present proper motions for 15 pulsars which are observed regularly by the Nanshan 25-m radio telescope. Two methods, the frequentist method (Coles et al.2011) and the Bayesian (Lentati et al. 2014) method, are used and the results are compared. We demonstrate that the two methods can be applied to young pulsar data sets that exhibit large amounts of timing noise with steep spectral exponents and give consistent results. The measured positions also agree with very-long-baseline interferometric positions. Proper motions for four pulsars are obtained for the first time, and improved values are obtained for five pulsars.
Until recently, uncertainty quantification in low energy nuclear theory was typically performed using frequentist approaches. However in the last few years, the field has shifted toward Bayesian statistics for evaluating confidence intervals. Although there are statistical arguments to prefer the Bayesian approach, no direct comparison is available. In this work, we compare, directly and systematically, the frequentist and Bayesian approaches to quantifying uncertainties in direct nuclear reactions. Starting from identical initial assumptions, we determine confidence intervals associated with the elastic and the transfer process for both methods, which are evaluated against data via a comparison of the empirical coverage probabilities. Expectedly, the frequentist approach is not as flexible as the Bayesian approach in exploring parameter space and often ends up in a different minimum. We also show that the two methods produce significantly different correlations. In the end, the frequentist approach produces significantly narrower uncertainties on the considered observables than the Bayesian. Our study demonstrates that the uncertainties on the reaction observables considered here within the Bayesian approach represent reality more accurately than the much narrower uncertainties obtained using the standard frequentist approach.
We report on the proper motions of Balmer-dominated filaments in Keplers supernova remnant using high resolution images obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope at two epochs separated by about 10 years. We use the improved proper motion measurements and revised values of shock velocities to derive a distance to Kepler of 5.1 [+0.8, -0.7] kpc. The main shock around the northern rim of the remnant has a typical speed of 1690 km/s and is encountering material with densities of about 8 cm^-3. We find evidence for the variation of shock properties over small spatial scales, including differences in the driving pressures as the shock wraps around a curved cloud surface. We find that the Balmer filaments ahead of the ejecta knot on the northwest boundary of the remnant are becoming fainter and more diffuse. We also find that the Balmer filaments associated with circumstellar material in the interior regions of the remnant are due to shocks with significantly lower velocities and that the brightness variations among these filaments trace the density distribution of the material, which may have a disk-like geometry.
Using commissioning data from the first year of operation of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiments (CHIME) Pulsar backend system, we conduct a systematic analysis of the Faraday Rotation Measure (RM) of the northern hemisphere pulsars detected by CHIME. We present 55 new RMs as well as obtain improved RM uncertainties for 25 further pulsars. CHIMEs low observing frequency and wide bandwidth between 400-800 MHz contribute to the precision of our measurements, whereas the high cadence observation provide extremely high signal-to-noise co-added data. Our results represent a significant increase of the pulsar RM census, particularly regarding the northern hemisphere. These new RMs are for sources that are located in the Galactic plane out to 10 kpc, as well as off the plane to a scale height of ~16 kpc. This improved knowledge of the Faraday sky will contribute to future Galactic large-scale magnetic structure and ionosphere modelling.
We perform a comparison between the smoothed particle magnetohydrodynamics (SPMHD) code, Phantom, and the Eulerian grid-based code, Flash, on the small-scale turbulent dynamo in driven, Mach 10 turbulence. We show, for the first time, that the exponential growth and saturation of an initially weak magnetic field via the small-scale dynamo can be successfully reproduced with SPMHD. The two codes agree on the behaviour of the magnetic energy spectra, the saturation level of magnetic energy, and the distribution of magnetic field strengths during the growth and saturation phases. The main difference is that the dynamo growth rate, and its dependence on resolution, differs between the codes, caused by differences in the numerical dissipation and shock capturing schemes leading to differences in the effective Prandtl number in Phantom and Flash.
We outline an approach yielding proper motions with higher precision than exists in present catalogs for a sample of stars in the Kepler field. To increase proper motion precision we combine first moment centroids of Kepler pixel data from a single Season with existing catalog positions and proper motions. We use this astrometry to produce improved reduced proper motion diagrams, analogous to a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, for stars identified as Kepler Objects of Interest. The more precise the relative proper motions, the better the discrimination between stellar luminosity classes. With UCAC4 and PPMXL epoch 2000 positions (and proper motions from those catalogs as quasi-bayesian priors) astrometry for a single test Channel (21) and Season (0) spanning two years yields proper motions with an average per-coordinate proper motion error of 1.0 millisecond of arc per year, over a factor of three better than existing catalogs. We apply a mapping between a reduced proper motion diagram and an HR diagram, both constructed using HST parallaxes and proper motions, to estimate Kepler Object of Interest K-band absolute magnitudes. The techniques discussed apply to any future small-field astrometry as well as the rest of the Kepler field.