DAA/DI astro-ph Coffee Discussion

We present the discovery of compact, obscured star formation in galaxies at z 0.6 that exhibit >1000 km/s outflows. Using optical morphologies from the Hubble Space Telescope and infrared photometry from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, we estimate star formation rate (SFR) surface densities that approach Sigma_SFR 3000 Msun/yr/kpc^2, comparable to the Eddington limit from radiation pressure on dust grains. We argue that feedback associated with a compact starburst in the form of radiation pressure from massive stars and ram pressure from supernovae and stellar winds is sufficient to produce the high-velocity outflows we observe, without the need to invoke feedback from an active galactic nucleus.

The measurement of electron temperatures and metallicities in H ii regions and Planetary Nebulae (PNe) has-for several decades-presented a problem: results obtained using different techniques disagree. What is worse, they disagree consistently. There have been numerous attempts to explain these discrepancies, but none has provided a satisfactory solution to the problem. In this paper, we explore the possibility that electrons in H ii regions and PNe depart from a Maxwell-Boltzmann equilibrium energy distribution. We adopt a "kappa-distribution" for the electron energies. Such distributions are widely found in Solar System plasmas, where they can be directly measured. This simple assumption is able to explain the temperature and metallicity discrepancies in H...

We present the measured Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) flux from 474 optically-selected MaxBCG clusters that fall within the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) Equatorial survey region. The ACT Equatorial region used in this analysis covers 510 square degrees and overlaps Stripe 82 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We also present the measured SZ flux stacked on 52 X-ray-selected MCXC clusters that fall within the ACT Equatorial region and an ACT Southern survey region covering 455 square degrees. We find that the measured SZ flux from the X-ray-selected clusters is consistent with expectations. However, we find that the measured SZ flux from the optically-selected clusters is both significantly lower than expectations and lower...

We present the results from a survey for 12CO emission in 40 luminous sub-millimetre galaxies (SMGs), with 850um fluxes of S850 = 4 - 20 mJy, conducted with the Plateau de Bure Interferometer. We detect 12CO emission in 32 SMGs at z~1.2 - 4.1, including 16 SMGs not previously published. Using multiple 12CO line (J_up =2 - 7) observations, we derive a median spectral line energy distribution for luminous SMGs and use this to estimate a mean gas mass of (5.3 +/- 1.0) \times 10^10 Msun. We report the discovery of a fundamental relationship between 12CO FWHM and 12CO line luminosity in high-redshift starbursts, which we interpret as...

We report on the detection of infrared light from the super-Earth 55 Cnc e, based on four occultations obtained with Warm Spitzer at 4.5 microns. Our data analysis consists of a two-part process. In a first step, we perform individual analyses of each dataset and compare several baseline models to optimally account for the systematics affecting each lightcurve. We apply independent photometric correction techniques, including polynomial detrending and pixel-mapping, that yield consistent results at the 1-sigma level. In a second step, we perform a global MCMC analysis including all four datasets, that yields an occultation depth of 131+-28ppm, translating to a brightness temperature of 2360+-300 K in the IRAC-4.5...

The Earth's atmosphere affects ground-based astronomical observations. Scattering, absorption, and radiation processes deteriorate the signal-to-noise ratio of the data received. For scheduling astronomical observations it is, therefore, important to accurately estimate the wavelength-dependent effect of the Earth's atmosphere on the observed flux. In order to increase the accuracy of the exposure time calculator of the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal, an atmospheric model was developed as part of the Austrian ESO In-Kind contribution. It includes all relevant components, such as scattered moonlight, scattered starlight, zodiacal light, atmospheric thermal radiation and absorption, and non-thermal airglow emission. This paper focuses on atmospheric scattering processes that mostly...