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Register a new userAre High-Velocity Clouds the Building Blocks of the Local Group?
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Motivated by the apparent order-of-magnitude discrepancy between the observed number of Local Group satellite galaxies, and that predicted by Lambda-CDM hierarchical clustering cosmologies, we explore an alternate suggestion - perhaps the missing satellites are not actually ``missing, but are instead ``in disguise. The disguise we consider here is that of the classical HI High-Velocity Clouds. Is it possible that what have been thought of traditionally as a ``Galactic phenomenon, are actually the building blocks of the Local Group? We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this hypothesis, and highlight avenues of future research which may provide an unequivocal resolution to this contentious issue.
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High-velocity clouds (HVCs) are clouds of HI seen around the Milky Way with velocities inconsistent with Galactic rotation, have unknown distances and masses and controversial origins. One possibility is that HVCs are associated with the small dark matter halos seen in models of galaxy formation and distributed at distances of 150 kpc - 1 Mpc. We report on our attempts to detect the analogs to such putative extragalactic clouds in three groups of galaxies similar to our own Local Group using the ATNF Parkes telescope and Compact Array. Eleven dwarf galaxies were found, but no HI clouds lacking stars were detected. Using the population of compact HVCs around the Milky Way as a template, we find that our non-detection of analogs implies that they must be clustered within 160 kpc of the Milky Way (and other galaxies) with an average HI mass <4x10^5 M(sun) at the 95% confidence level. This is in accordance with recent limits derived by other authors. If our groups are true analogs to the Local Group, then this makes the original Blitz et al. and Braun & Burton picture of HVCs residing out to 1 Mpc from the Milky Way extremely unlikely. The total HI mass in HVCs, < 10^8 M(sun), implies that there is not a large reservoir of neutral hydrogen waiting to be accreted onto the Milky Way. Any substantial reservoir of baryonic matter must be mostly ionized or condensed enough as to be undetectable.
A set of HI sources extracted from the north Galactic polar region by the ongoing ALFALFA survey has properties that are consistent with the interpretation that they are associated with isolated minihalos in the outskirts of the Local Group (LG). Unlike objects detected by previous surveys, such as the Compact High Velocity Clouds of Braun & Burton (1999), the HI clouds found by ALFALFA do not violate any structural requirements or halo scaling laws of the LambdaCDM structure paradigm, nor would they have been detected by extant HI surveys of nearby galaxy groups other than the LG. At a distance of d Mpc, their HI masses range between $5 x 10^4 d^2 and 10^6 d^2 solar and their HI radii between <0.4d and 1.6 d kpc. If they are parts of gravitationally bound halos, the total masses would be on order of 10^8--10^9 solar, their baryonic content would be signifcantly smaller than the cosmic fraction of 0.16 and present in a ionized gas phase of mass well exceeding that of the neutral phase. This study does not however prove that the minihalo interpretation is unique. Among possible alternatives would be that the clouds are shreds of the Leading Arm of the Magellanic Stream.
Network motifs are small building blocks of complex networks. Statistically significant motifs often perform network-specific functions. However, the precise nature of the connection between motifs and the global structure and function of networks remains elusive. Here we show that the global structure of some real networks is statistically determined by the probability of connections within motifs of size at most 3, once this probability accounts for node degrees. The connectivity profiles of node triples in these networks capture all their local and global properties. This finding impacts methods relying on motif statistical significance, and enriches our understanding of the elementary forces that shape the structure of complex networks.
Compact high-velocity clouds (CHVCs) are the most distant of the HVCs in the Local Group model and would have HI volume densities of order 0.0003/cm^3. Clouds with these volume densities and the observed neutral hydrogen column densities will be largely ionized, even if exposed only to the extragalactic ionizing radiation field. Here we examine the implications of this process for models of CHVCs. We have modeled the ionization structure of spherical clouds (with and without dark matter halos) for a large range of densities and sizes, appropriate to CHVCs over the range of suggested distances, exposed to the extragalactic ionizing photon flux. Constant-density cloud models in which the CHVCs are at Local Group distances have total (ionized plus neutral) gas masses roughly 20-30 times larger than the neutral gas masses, implying that the gas mass alone of the observed population of CHVCs is about 40 billion solar masses. With a realistic (10:1) dark matter to gas mass ratio, the total mass in such CHVCs is a significant fraction of the dynamical mass of the Local Group, and their line widths would exceed the observed FWHM. Models with dark matter halos fare even more poorly; they must lie within approximately 200 kpc of the Galaxy. We show that exponential neutral hydrogen column density profiles are a natural consequence of an external source of ionizing photons, and argue that these profiles cannot be used to derive model-independent distances to the CHVCs. These results argue strongly that the CHVCs are not cosmological objects, and are instead associated with the Galactic halo.
Measurement scenarios containing events with relations of exclusivity represented by pentagons, heptagons, nonagons, etc., or their complements are the only ones in which quantum probabilities cannot be described classically. Interestingly, quantum theory predicts that the maximum values for any of these graphs cannot be achieved in Bell inequality scenarios. With the exception of the pentagon, this prediction remained experimentally unexplored. Here we test the quantum maxima for the heptagon and the complement of the heptagon using three- and five-dimensional quantum states, respectively. In both cases, we adopt two different encodings: linear transverse momentum and orbital angular momentum of single photons. Our results exclude maximally noncontextual hidden-variable theories and are in good agreement with the maxima predicted by quantum theory.
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