MHO Catalogue

Recently I’ve been collaborating with Chris Davis on the catalogue of Molecular Hydrogen Emission-Line Objects (MHOs for short). This project is going forward quite well and recently Chris drafted an article announcing the catalogue which was submitted to A&A. The article is also available from astro-ph.

The catalogue itself has a home page where one could have a look at current numberings of many outflows detected in NIR. There is also a possibility to identify the objects by their pictures. People working in the are of star formation and outflows are encouraged to request the numbers for their new detected objects in NIR. More details can be obtained in the actual MHO home page.

core JCMT 18354-0649S

We have successfully submitted our paper entitled “Supersonic turbulence in the cold massive core JCMT 18354-0649S” into MNRAS. The paper is leaded by our former PhD student and now Dr. Patrick Carolan. Paper includes radio-line observations of this particular core taken at the JCMT and MOPRA. The results were then fitted by the 3D non-LTE radiative transfer code by Eric Keto.

Here is a quote from the Abstract:

In this example of a cold massive core, JCMT 18354-0649S, a possible high mass analogue to a low mass star forming core is studied. Line and continuum observations from JCMT, Mopra Telescope and Spitzer are presented and modelled in detail using a 3D molecular line radiative transfer code. In almost every way JCMT 18354-0649S, is a scaled-up version of a typical low mass core with similar temperatures, chemical abundances and densities. The difference is that both the infall velocity and the turbulent width of the line profiles are an order of magnitude larger. While the higher infall velocity is expected due to the large mass of JCMT 18354-0649S, we suggest that this highly supersonic turbulence is best understood as being due to a large population of clumps embedded in a more tenuous medium. Many of these clumps will eventually undergo gravitational collapse to form individual low mass stars in a cluster around the massive stars.

NIR Spectroscopy paper accepted

Our paper is accepted for publication in AJ! That was quick! So anytime soon I’ll be linking it here.

Update (23.Oct.2008) : The article now has a bib-code 2008arXiv0810.3943A and can be accessed via ADS.

Orion Paper Submitted

Recently I’ve become a silent participant to a huge collaboration intended to map all the molecular hydrogen outflows in Orion-A Molecular Ridge. The submitted paper is entitled: A census of molecular outflows and their sources along the Orion A molecular ridge Characteristics and overall distribution by Davis et al. It is a remarkable work combining data from several wave-bands NIR to MM. Here is the abstract:

NIR Spectroscopy Paper

We have submitted a paper entitled “NEAR-IR SPECTROSCOPY OF YOUNG STARS IN THE BRAID NEBULA STAR FORMATION REGION IN CYGNUS OB7” by Aspin et al. to Astrophysical Journal. This is part of a big project on Braid Nebula Star-Formation Region that I’m actively participating. Here is the abstract of the paper:

We present 1.4 to 2.5 µm integral field spectroscopy of 16 stars in the Braid Nebula star formation region in Cygnus OB7. These data forms one aspect of a large-scale multi-wavelength survey aimed at determining an unbiased estimate of the number, mass distribution, and evolutionary state of the young stars within this one square degree area of the previously poorly studied Lynds 1003 molecular cloud. Our new spectroscopic data, when combined with 2MASS near-IR photometry, provide evidence of membership of many of these objects in the regions pre-main sequence population. We discuss both the characteristics of the young stars found in the region and the level of star forming activity present.

Now we wait for the referee’s response, and for the papers in the same series by other participants of the collaboration (myself inclusive).

Braid Poster

Recently I’ve prepared a poster about our favorite object – Braid Nebula and it’s surroundings which was presented at the JENAM 2007 meeting held in Armenia from 20-25 August 2007. The snapshot of the poster can be viewed here and in due course I’ll put the pdf version somewhere around for an easy access. I’m still building my site and very soon I’ll post more on a science side of this contribution, but for now I just want to spread the word on how the poster was composed.

Whole process of preparation was done using Apple Pages in contrary to my previous posters which were made using Microsoft PowerPoint. The Mac software seamed to me much easier to handle and gave me a lot of flexibility in making fields and changing the overall shape. After finishing the work I’ve exported it into PDF of 13MB, but when I’ve created a TIFF version of the very same poster it became 320MB!

OK, I don’t wont to pretend that this was my own genuine idea to use Apple Pages to make a poster. I did some googleing and found a post at the Mac Singularity where the author convinced me pretty well to make a poster the Mac-way and I’m really grateful for that and would not go back again.