The optical properties of the z = 0.435 quasar PKS 1222+216 (4C+21.35) are summarized since the discovery of impressive gamma-ray activity in this source by Fermi/LAT. Unlike several other gamma-ray-bright blazars, there appears to be little connecti
on between optical and gamma-ray activity. Spectropolarimetry shows this object to be a composite system with optical emission from both a polarized, variable synchrotron power-law and unpolarized light from a stable blue continuum source (+broad emission-line region) contributing to the observed spectrum. Spectrophotometry over a period of about two years does not detect significant variability in the strong, broad emission lines, despite large optical continuum variations. This suggests that the relativistic jet has little influence on the output of the broad emission-line region, possibly either because the highly beamed continuum ionizes only a small portion of the line-emitting gas, or the observed non-thermal continuum originates parsecs downstream from the base of the jet, further away from the central engine than the broad emission-line region.
In this paper, we describe a new hydrodynamics code for 1D and 2D astrophysical simulations, BETHE-hydro, that uses time-dependent, arbitrary, unstructured grids. The core of the hydrodynamics algorithm is an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) appro
ach, in which the gradient and divergence operators are made compatible using the support-operator method. We present 1D and 2D gravity solvers that are finite differenced using the support-operator technique, and the resulting system of linear equations are solved using the tridiagonal method for 1D simulations and an iterative multigrid-preconditioned conjugate-gradient method for 2D simulations. Rotational terms are included for 2D calculations using cylindrical coordinates. We document an incompatibility between a subcell pressure algorithm to suppress hourglass motions and the subcell remapping algorithm and present a modified subcell pressure scheme that avoids this problem. Strengths of this code include a straightforward structure, enabling simple inclusion of additional physics packages, the ability to use a general equation of state, and most importantly, the ability to solve self-gravitating hydrodynamic flows on time-dependent, arbitrary grids. In what follows, we describe in detail the numerical techniques employed and, with a large suite of tests, demonstrate that BETHE-hydro finds accurate solutions with 2$^{nd}$-order convergence.
Since type Ia Supernovae (SNe) explode in galaxies, they can, in principle, be used as the same tracer of the large-scale structure as their hosts to measure baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). To realize this, one must obtain a dense integrated sam
pling of SNe over a large fraction of the sky, which may only be achievable photometrically with future projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The advantage of SN BAOs is that SNe have more uniform luminosities and more accurate photometric redshifts than galaxies, but the disadvantage is that they are transitory and hard to obtain in large number at high redshift. We find that a half-sky photometric SN survey to redshift z = 0.8 is able to measure the baryon signature in the SN spatial power spectrum. Although dark energy constraints from SN BAOs are weak, they can significantly improve the results from SN luminosity distances of the same data, and the combination of the two is no longer sensitive to cosmic microwave background priors.
