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Abstract:

The radio sky is not steady on timescales below one second. Pulsars (including the rotating radio transients RRATs) and solar-system objects (e.g. solar flares, jupiter bursts, saturn lightning) give rise to sub-second pulses. Also in many known radiation processes coherent radiation can more easily occur at longer wavelengths, for which the size of the emitting region is comparable to the wavelength. This makes low frequency surveys ideally suited for the detection of new emission mechanisms caused by compact objects, such as white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. To detect as many of these Fast Radio Transients (FRATs) as possible, we are setting up a technique to detect and identify short single pulses with LOFAR in real-time, with unprecedented sensitivity in this frequency range, and excellent discrimination against terrestrial signals.

Abstract:

In this paper, we report on radio (Very Large Array and Austrialian Telescope Compact Array) and X-ray (RXTE, Chandra and Swift) observations of the outburst decay of the transient black hole candidate H 1743-322 in early 2008. We find that the X-ray light curve followed an exponential decay, levelling off towards its quiescent level. The exponential decay time-scale is ≈4 days and the quiescent flux corresponds to a luminosity of erg s^-1. This together with the relation between quiescent X-ray luminosity and orbital period reported in the literature suggests that H 1743-322 has an orbital period longer than ≈10 h. Both the radio and X-ray light curve show evidence for flares. The radio-X-ray correlation can be well described by a power-law with index ≈0.18. This is much lower than the index of ≈0.6-0.7 found for the decay of several black hole transients before. The radio spectral index measured during one of the radio flares while the source is in the low-hard state is -0.5 ± 0.15, which indicates that the radio emission is optically thin. This is unlike what has been found before in black hole sources in the low-hard state. We attribute the radio flares and the low index for the radio-X-ray correlation to the presence of shocks downstream the jet flow, triggered by ejection events earlier in the outburst. We find no evidence for a change in X-ray power-law spectral index during the decay, although the relatively high extinction of NH ≈ 2.3 × 10²² cm^-2 limits the detected number of soft photons and thus the accuracy of the spectral fits. © 2009 RAS.

Abstract:

We describe the reduction of data taken with the PACS instrument on board the Herschel Space Observatory in the Science Demonstration Phase of the Herschel-ATLAS (H-ATLAS) survey, specifically data obtained for a 4 × 4 deg2 region using Herschel's fast-scan (60 arcsec s-1) parallel mode. We describe in detail a pipeline for data reduction using customized procedures within hipe from data retrieval to the production of science-quality images. We found that the standard procedure for removing cosmic ray glitches also removed parts of bright sources and so implemented an effective two-stage process to minimize these problems. The pronounced 1/f noise is removed from the timelines using 3.4- and 2.5-arcmin boxcar high-pass filters at 100 and 160 μm. Empirical measurements of the point spread function (PSF) are used to determine the encircled energy fraction as a function of aperture size. For the 100- and 160-μm bands, the effective PSFs are ~9 and ~13 arcsec (FWHM), and the 90-per cent encircled energy radii are 13 and 18 arcsec. Astrometric accuracy is good to ≤2 arcsec. The noise in the final maps is correlated between neighbouring pixels and rather higher than advertised prior to launch. For a pair of cross-scans, the 5σ point-source sensitivities are 125-165 mJy for 9-13 arcsec radius apertures at 100 μm and 150-240 mJy for 13-18 arcsec radius apertures at 160 μm. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 RAS.

Abstract:

We use the Herschel-Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (ATLAS) science demonstration data to investigate the star formation properties of radio-selected galaxies in the GAMA-9h field as a function of radio luminosity and redshift. Radio selection at the lowest radio luminosities, as expected, selects mostly starburst galaxies. At higher radio luminosities, where the population is dominated by active galactic nuclei (AGN), we find that some individual objects are associated with high far-infrared luminosities. However, the far-infrared properties of the radio-loud population are statistically indistinguishable from those of a comparison population of radio-quiet galaxies matched in redshift and K-band absolute magnitude. There is thus no evidence that the host galaxies of these largely low-luminosity (Fanaroff-Riley class I), and presumably low-excitation, AGN, as a population, have particularly unusual star formation histories. Models in which the AGN activity in higher luminosity, high-excitation radio galaxies is triggered by major mergers would predict a luminosity-dependent effect that is not seen in our data (which only span a limited range in radio luminosity) but which may well be detectable with the full Herschel-ATLAS data set. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 RAS.

Abstract:

In the following paper, we present an internal shocks model, iShocks, for simulating a variety of relativistic jet scenarios; these scenarios can range from a single ejection event to an almost continuous jet, and are highly user configurable. Although the primary focus in the following paper is black hole X-ray binary jets, the model is scale and source independent and could be used for supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei or other flows such as jets from neutron stars. Discrete packets of plasma (or 'shells') are used to simulate the jet volume. A two-shell collision gives rise to an internal shock, which acts as an electron re-energization mechanism. Using a pseudo-random distribution of the shell properties, the results show how for the first time it is possible to reproduce a flat/inverted spectrum (associated with compact radio jets) in a conical jet whilst taking the adiabatic energy losses into account. Previous models have shown that electron re-acceleration is essential in order to obtain a flat spectrum from an adiabatic conical jet: multiple internal shocks prove to be efficient in providing this re-energization. We also show how the high-frequency turnover/break in the spectrum is correlated with the jet power, νb ∝ L^∼0.6W, and the flat-spectrum synchrotron flux is correlated with the total jet power, F ν ∝ L^∼1.4W. Both the correlations are in agreement with previous analytical predictions. © 2009 RAS.