No Arabic abstract
The bulge carbon stars have been a mystery since their discovery, because they are about 2.5mag too faint to be regarded as genuine AGB stars, if located inside the metal-rich bulge (m-M=14.5mag). Part of the mystery can be solved if these carbon stars are related to the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (SDG; m-M=17.0mag). They are in that case not old and metal-rich, but young, ~0.1 Gyr, with SMC-like metallicity. The sigma_RV=113+/-14 km/s radial velocity dispersion of the stars appears to be consistent with bulge membership. On the other hand, a similar velocity dispersion could be the result from an induced star formation event when the SDG crosses the galactic midplane. It is suggested that the carbon stars are tracers of such an event and that they therefore are located at distances related to the SDG. However, the majority of the carbon stars are not member of the SDG, nor are they similar to the C-stars which are member of the SDG. The radial velocities can be used to determine a possible membership to the SDG. However, they do not give information about the distance of the stars. In particular, if the stars are located at a distance comparable to the SDG. This implies that only the period-luminosity relation can be used to distinguish unambiguously if the carbon stars are located at bulge-like or SDG-like distances. Thus far only carbon stars with reliable periods have been identified at a SDG related distance.
The interstellar medium (ISM) is subject, on one hand, to heating and cooling processes that tend to segregate it into distinct phases due to thermal instability (TI), and on the other, to turbulence-driving mechanisms that tend to produce strong nonlinear fluctuations in all the thermodynamic variables. In this regime, large-scale turbulent compressions in the stable warm neutral medium (WNM) dominate the clump-formation process rather than the linear developent of TI. Cold clumps formed by this mechanism are often bounded by sharp density and temperature discontinuities, which however are not contact discontinuities as in the classical 2-phase model, but rather phase transition fronts, across which there is net mass and momentum flux from the WNM into the clumps. The clumps grow mainly by accretion through their boundaries, are in both thermal and ram pressure balance with their surroundings, and are internally turbulent as well, thus also having significant density fluctuations inside. The temperature and density of the cold and warm gas around the phase transition fronts fluctuate with time and location due to fluctuations in the turbulent pressure. Moreover, shock-compressed diffuse unstable gas can remain in the unstable regime for up to a few Myr before it undergoes a phase transition to the cold phase. These processes populate the classically forbidden density and temperature ranges. Since gas at all temperatures appears to be present in bi- or tri-stable turbulence, we conclude that the word phase applies only locally, surrounding phase transition sites in the gas. Globally, the word phase must relax its meaning to simply denote a certain temperature or density range.
Global Climate Models (GCMs) provide forecasts of future climate warming using a wide variety of highly sophisticated anthropogenic CO2 emissions models as input, each based on the evolution of four emissions drivers: population p, standard of living g, energy productivity (or efficiency) f and energy carbonization c. The range of scenarios considered is extremely broad, however, and this is a primary source of forecast uncertainty. Here, it is shown both theoretically and observationally how the evolution of the human system can be considered from a surprisingly simple thermodynamic perspective in which it is unnecessary to explicitly model two of the emissions drivers: population and standard of living. Specifically, the human system grows through a self-perpetuating feedback loop in which the consumption rate of primary energy resources stays tied to the historical accumulation of global economic production - or p times g - through a time-independent factor of 9.7 +/- 0.3 milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 US dollar. This important constraint, and the fact that f and c have historically varied rather slowly, points towards substantially narrowed visions of future emissions scenarios for implementation in GCMs.
Monopole-like objects have been identified in multiple lattice studies, and there is now a significant amount of literature on their importance in phenomenology. Some analytic indications of their role, however, are still missing. The t Hooft-Polyakov monopoles, originally derived in the Georgi-Glashow model, are an important dynamical ingredient in theories with extended supersymmetry ${cal N} = 2,,4$, and help explain the issues related with electric-magnetic duality. There is no such solution in QCD-like theories without scalar fields. However, all of these theories have instantons and their finite-$T$ constituents known as instanton-dyons (or instanton-monopoles). The latter leads to semiclassical partition functions, which for ${cal N} = 2,,4$ theories were shown to be identical (Poisson dual) to the partition function for monopoles. We show how, in a pure gauge theory, the semiclassical instanton-based partition function can also be Poisson-transformed into a partition function, interpreted as the one of moving and rotating monopoles.
Despite great progress in neuroscience, there are still fundamental unanswered questions about the brain, including the origin of subjective experience and consciousness. Some answers might rely on new physical mechanisms. Given that biophotons have been discovered in the brain, it is interesting to explore if neurons use photonic communication in addition to the well-studied electro-chemical signals. Such photonic communication in the brain would require waveguides. Here we review recent work [S. Kumar, K. Boone, J. Tuszynski, P. Barclay, and C. Simon, Scientific Reports 6, 36508 (2016)] suggesting that myelinated axons could serve as photonic waveguides. The light transmission in the myelinated axon was modeled, taking into account its realistic imperfections, and experiments were proposed both in-vivo and in-vitro to test this hypothesis. Potential implications for quantum biology are discussed.
There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in vastly separated cultures, such as the Australian Aboriginal cultures and Greek mythology? Second, why do most cultures call them Seven Sisters even though most people with good eyesight see only six stars? Here we show that both these puzzles may be explained by a combination of the great antiquity of the stories combined with the proper motion of the stars, and that these stories may predate the departure of most modern humans out of Africa around 100,000 BC.