## astro-ph coffee suggested papers for Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 03:00:00 PM

astro-ph coffee will be held at the date and time above in the PAB 3rd-floor reading room. Some suggested papers of interest are listed below.

25 Mar 2013

The star formation rate (SFR) in the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ, i.e. the central 500 pc) of the Milky Way is lower by a factor of >10 than expected for the substantial amount of dense gas it contains, which challenges current star formation theories. In this paper, we quantify which physical mechanisms could be causing this observation. On scales larger than the disc scale height, the low SFR is found to be consistent with episodic star formation due to secular instabilities or variations ...

22 Mar 2013

We updated our radially-resolved SAMs of galaxy formation to track the radial distribution of stars, metals, atomic and molecular gas in galactic disks. The models are run on both MS and MS II using the recipes outlined in Fu et al. (2010) and Guo et al. (2011), with 3 main changes: (1) We adopt a simple star formation law where \Sigma_SFR \propto \Sigma_H2. (2) We inject the heavy elements produced by SNe directly into the halo, instead of first mixing them with the disk cold gas. (3) We inclu...

18 Mar 2013

In a matched sample of Seyfert and quiescent galaxies we simultaneously probe the stellar and molecular gas kinematics from 1 kpc down to 50 pc with the aim of identifying the dynamical processes dictating black hole accretion rates. This first paper compares the global characteristics of a sample of ten galaxies. We find several differences within a radius of 500 pc that are correlated with AGN activity. The Seyferts have: (1) a more centrally concentrated nuclear stellar surface brightness wi...

24 Mar 2013

We measure the stellar mass-metallicity relation at five epochs ranging to z~2.3. We quantify, for the first time, evolution in the shape of the mass-metallicity relation as a function of redshift; the mass-metallicity relation flattens at late times. There is an empirical upper limit to the gas-phase oxygen abundance in star-forming galaxies that is independent of redshift. From examination of the mass-metallicity relation and its observed scatter we show that the flattening at late times is a...

25 Mar 2013

I present a new framework for estimating a galaxy's gravitational potential, Phi, from its stellar kinematics. It adopts a fully non-parametric model for the galaxy's unknown phase-space distribution function, f, that takes full advantage of Jeans' theorem. Given an expression for the joint likelihood of Phi and f, the likelihood of Phi is calculated by using a Dirichlet process mixture to represent the prior on f and marginalising.

25 Mar 2013

It is difficult for intermediate-mass X-ray binaries to form compact intermediate-mass binary pulsars (IMBPs) with a short orbital-period ($\la 3 \rm d$), which have a heavy ($\ga 0.4 M_{\odot}$) CO or ONeMg white dwarf companions. Since neutron star + He star binaries may experience common-envelope evolution, they have some advantage to account for the formation of short orbital-period IMBPs. In this work, we explore the probability of IMBPs formed by this evolutionary channel. Using Eggleton'...

22 Mar 2013

In this paper, we report all results obtained with a fiber scrambler on the Hamilton spectrograph at Lick Observatory. We demonstrate an improvement in the stability of the instrumental profile using this fiber scrambler. Additionally, we present data obtained with a double scrambler that further improves the stability of the instrument by a factor 2. These results show that errors related to the coupling between the telescope and the spectrograph are the dominant source of instrumental profile...

astroph.py v0.91ijc based on the original astroph.py. Updated 2013/03/28 14:31:48