17554708
Far-Infrared Observations of the Very Low Luminosity Embedded Source L1521F-IRS in the Taurus Star-Forming Region
We investigate the environment of the very low luminosity object L1521F-IRS using data from the Taurus Spitzer Legacy Survey. The MIPS 160 μm image shows both extended emission from the Taurus cloud and emission from multiple cold cores over a 1° × 2° region. Analysis shows that the cloud dust temperature is 14.2 ± 0.4 K and the extinction ratio is A_(160)/A_K = 0.010 ± 0.001 up to A_V ~ 4 mag. We find κ_(160) = 0.23 ± 0.046 cm^2 g^(–1) for the specific opacity of the gas-dust mixture. Therefore, for dust in the Taurus cloud we find that the 160 μm opacity is significantly higher than that measured for the diffuse interstellar medium, but not too different from dense cores, even at modest extinction values. Furthermore, the 160 μm image shows features that do not appear in the IRAS 100 μm image. We identify six regions as cold cores, i.e., colder than 14.2 K, all of which have counterparts in extinction maps or C^(18)O maps. Three of the six cores contain embedded young stellar objects, which demonstrates the cores are sites of current star formation. We compare the effects of L1521F-IRS on its natal core and find there is no evidence for dust heating at 160 or 100 μm by the embedded source. From the infrared luminosity L_(TIR) = 0.024 L_⊙ we find L_(bol_int) = 0.034 - 0.046 L_⊙, thus confirming the source's low luminosity. Comparison of L1521F-IRS with theoretical simulations for the very early phases of star formation appears to rule out the first core collapse phase. The evolutionary state appears similar to or younger than the class 0 phase, and the estimated mass is likely to be substellar.
119498034
Submillimeter Dust Continuum Studies of Low and High Mass Star Formation
Studying the physical environments of low mass and high mass cores using dust continuum emission provides important observational constraints on theoretical models of star formation. The motivation and procedure for modeling dust continuum emission is reviewed and the results of recent surveys towards low mass and high mass star forming regions are compared.
118722765
CO2 ICE TOWARD LOW-LUMINOSITY EMBEDDED PROTOSTARS: EVIDENCE FOR EPISODIC MASS ACCRETION VIA CHEMICAL HISTORY
We present Spitzer IRS spectroscopy of CO{sub 2} ice bending mode spectra at 15.2 {mu}m toward 19 young stellar objects (YSOs) with luminosity lower than 1 L{sub Sun} (3 with luminosity lower than 0.1 L{sub Sun }). Ice on dust grain surfaces can encode the history of heating because pure CO{sub 2} ice forms only at elevated temperature, T > 20 K, and thus around protostars of higher luminosity. Current internal luminosities of YSOs with L < 1L{sub Sun} do not provide the conditions needed to produce pure CO{sub 2} ice at radii where typical envelopes begin. The presence of detectable amounts of pure CO{sub 2} ice would signify a higher past luminosity. Many of the spectra require a contribution from a pure, crystalline CO{sub 2} component, traced by the presence of a characteristic band splitting in the 15.2 {mu}m bending mode. About half of the sources (9 out of 19) in the low-luminosity sample have evidence for pure CO{sub 2} ice, and 6 of these have significant double-peaked features, which are very strong evidence of pure CO{sub 2} ice. The presence of the pure CO{sub 2} ice component indicates that the dust temperature, and hence luminosity of the centralmore » star/accretion disk system, must have been higher in the past. An episodic accretion scenario, in which mixed CO-CO{sub 2} ice is converted to pure CO{sub 2} ice during each high-luminosity phase, explains the presence of pure CO{sub 2} ice, the total amount of CO{sub 2} ice, and the observed residual C{sup 18}O gas.« less
119073347
Fragmentation and Evolution of Molecular Clouds. I. Algorithm and First Results
We present a series of simulations of the fragmentation of a molecular cloud, leading to the formation of a cluster of protostellar cores. We use Gaussian initial conditions with a power spectrum P(k) ∝ k-2, assume an isothermal equation of state, and neglect turbulence and magnetic fields. The purpose of these simulations is to address a specific numerical problem called artificial fragmentation, which plagues simulations of cloud fragmentation. We argue that this is a serious problem, and that the only reasonable and practical way to address it within the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) algorithm is to use a technique called particle splitting. We performed three simulations, with Ngen = 0, 1, and 2 levels of particle splitting. All simulations start up with 643 SPH particles, but their effective resolutions correspond to 643, 1283, and 2563 particles, respectively. The third simulation properly resolves the Jeans mass throughout the entire system, at all times, thus preventing artificial fragmentation. The high resolution of our simulations results in the formation of a large number of protostellar cores, nearly 3000 for the largest simulation. The final mass distribution of cores is lognormal, and the distribution shifts down in mass as the resolution improves. The width of the distribution is about 1.5 (e.g., a factor of 30 in the mass), and the low-mass edge of the distribution corresponds to the lowest core mass that the code can resolve. This result differs from previous claims of a relationship between the mean of the distribution and the initial Jeans mass.
118401675
The Diskionary: A Glossary of Terms Commonly Used for Disks and Related Objects, First Edition
Based on a panel discussion at the meeting "New Light on Young Stars: Spitzer's View of Circumstellar Disks", we provide some definitions of common usage of terms describing disks and related objects.
5949463
THE SPATIALLY RESOLVED STAR FORMATION LAW FROM INTEGRAL FIELD SPECTROSCOPY: VIRUS-P OBSERVATIONS OF NGC 5194
We investigate the relation between the star formation rate (SFR) surface density (SIGMA{sub SFR}) and the mass surface density of gas (SIGMA{sub gas}) in NGC 5194 (a.k.a. M51a, Whirlpool Galaxy). Visible Integral field Replicable Unit Spectrograph Prototype (VIRUS-P) integral field spectroscopy of the central 4.1 x 4.1 kpc{sup 2} of the galaxy is used to measure Halpha, Hbeta, [O III]lambda5007, [N II]lambdalambda6548,6584, and [S II]lambdalambda6717,6731 emission line fluxes for 735 regions approx170 pc in diameter. We use the Balmer decrement to calculate nebular dust extinctions, and correct the observed fluxes in order to accurately measure SIGMA{sub SFR} in each region. Archival H I 21 cm and CO maps with spatial resolution similar to that of VIRUS-P are used to measure the atomic and molecular gas surface density for each region. We present a new method for fitting the star formation law (SFL), which includes the intrinsic scatter in the relation as a free parameter, allows the inclusion of non-detections in both SIGMA{sub gas} and SIGMA{sub SFR}, and is free of the systematics involved in performing linear regressions over incomplete data in logarithmic space. After rejecting regions whose nebular spectrum is affected by the central active galactic nucleus in NGC 5194,more » we use the [S II]/Halpha ratio to separate spectroscopically the contribution from the diffuse ionized gas (DIG) in the galaxy, which has a different temperature and ionization state from those of H II regions in the disk. The DIG only accounts for 11% of the total Halpha luminosity integrated over the whole central region, but on local scales it can account for up to a 100% of the Halpha emission, especially in the inter-arm regions. After removing the DIG contribution from the Halpha fluxes, we measure a slope N = 0.82 +- 0.05, and an intrinsic scatter epsilon = 0.43 +- 0.02 dex for the molecular gas SFL. We also measure a typical depletion timescale tau=SIGMA{sub H{sub i+H{sub 2}}}/SIGMA{sub SFR}approx2 Gyr, in good agreement with recent measurements by Bigiel et al. The atomic gas density shows no correlation with the SFR, and the total gas SFL in the sampled density range closely follows the molecular gas SFL. Integral field spectroscopy allows a much cleaner measurement of Halpha emission line fluxes than narrow-band imaging, since it is free of the systematics introduced by continuum subtraction, underlying photospheric absorption, and contamination by the [N II] doublet. We assess the validity of different corrections usually applied in narrow-band measurements to overcome these issues and find that while systematics are introduced by these corrections, they are only dominant in the low surface brightness regime. The disagreement with the previous measurement of a super-linear molecular SFL by Kennicutt et al. is most likely due to differences in the fitting method. Our results support the recent evidence for a low, and close to constant, star formation efficiency (SFE =tau{sup -1}) in the molecular component of the interstellar medium. The data show an excellent agreement with the recently proposed model of the SFL by Krumholz et al. The large intrinsic scatter observed may imply the existence of other parameters, beyond the availability of gas, which are important in setting the SFR.« less
5644183
Improving the infra-red of holographic descriptions of QCD
A surprisingly good holographic description of QCD can be obtained from naive five dimensional gauge theory on a truncated AdS space. We seek to improve the infra-red description of QCD in such models by using a more sophisticated metric and an action derived from string theory duals of chiral symmetry breaking. Our metric is smooth into the infra-red and the chiral condensate is a prediction of the dynamics. The theory reproduces QCD meson data at the 10% level.
5468967
Particle physics: Quarks on a gravitational string
Quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear force, is notoriously intractable. An alternative approach brings gravity to bear, and produces fairly accurate predictions of some physical quantities.
18789469
Exact results in softly broken supersymmetric models
Abstract We show how recent exact results in supersymmetric theories can be extended to models which include explicit soft supersymmetry breaking terms. We thus derive new exact results for non-supersymmetric models.
17882244
Triviality and the precision bound on the Higgs mass
Abstract The triviality of the scalar sector of the standard one-doublet Higgs model implies that this model is only an effective low-energy theory valid below some cut-off scale Λ . For a heavy Higgs this scale must be relatively low (10 TeV or less). Additional interactions coming from the underlying theory, and suppressed by the scale Λ , give rise to model-dependent corrections to precisely measured electroweak quantities. Dimension six operators arising from the underlying physics naturally contribute to the S and T parameters, and their effects should be included in a global fit to the precision data that determines any limit on the Higgs mass. Using dimensional analysis, we estimate the expected size of these corrections in a custodially-symmetric strongly-interacting underlying theory. Taking these operators' coefficients to be of natural size gives sufficiently large contributions to the T parameter to reconcile Higgs masses as large as 400–500 GeV with the precision data.
119248930
Holographic description of the phase diagram of a chiral symmetry breaking gauge theory
The large N$ \mathcal{N} = 4 $ gauge theory with quenched $ \mathcal{N} = 2 $ quark matter in the presence of a magnetic field displays chiral symmetry breaking. We study the temperature and chemical potential dependence of this theory using its gravity dual (based on the D3/D7 brane system). With massless quarks, at zero chemical potential, the theory displays a first order thermal transition where chiral symmetry is restored and simultaneously the mesons of the theory melt. At zero temperature, these transitions with chemical potential are second order and occur at different chemical potential values. Between the three there are two tri-critical points, the positions of which we identify. At finite quark mass the second order transition for chiral symmetry becomes a cross over and there is a critical point at the end of the first order transition, while the meson melting transition remains similar to the massless quark case. We track the movement of the critical points as the mass is raised relative to the magnetic field.