European Southern Observatory

About: European Southern Observatory is a facility organization based out in Garching bei München, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Galaxy & Stars. The organization has 3594 authors who have published 16157 publications receiving 823095 citations. The organization is also known as: The European Southern Observatory，ESO & ESO.

The incidence of obscuration in active galactic nuclei

Abstract: We study the incidence of nuclear obscuration on a complete sample of 1310 AGN selected on the basis of their rest-frame 2‐10 keV X-ray flux from the XM M-COSMOS survey, in the redshift range 0.3 < z < 3.5. We classify the AGN as obscured or un-obscured on the basis of either the optical spectral properties and the over all SED or the shape of the X-ray spectrum. The two classifications agree in about 70% of the ob jects, and the remaining 30% can be further subdivided into two distinct classes: at low l uminosities X-ray un-obscured AGN do not always show signs of broad lines or blue/UV continuum emission in their optical spectra, most likely due to galaxy dilution effects; a t high luminosities broad line AGN may have absorbed X-ray spectra, which hints at an increased incidence of small-scale (subparsec) dust-free obscuration. We confirm that the fraction of obscured AGN is a decreasing function of the intrinsic X-ray luminosity, while the incid ence of absorption shows significant evolution only for the most luminous AGN, which appear to be more commonly obscured at higher redshift. We find no significant difference between th e mean stellar masses and star formation rates of obscured and un-obscured AGN hosts. We conclude that the physical state of the medium responsible for obscuration in AGN is complex, and mainly determined by the radiation environment (nuclear luminosity) in a small region enclosed within the gravitational sphere of influence of the central black hole, but is la rgely insensitive to the wider scale galactic conditions.

Internal Dynamics of Globular Clusters

Abstract: Galactic globular clusters, which are ancient building blocks of our Galaxy, represent a very interesting family of stellar systems in which some fundamental dynamical processes have taken place on time scales shorter than the age of the universe. In contrast with galaxies, these clusters represent unique laboratories for learning about two-body relaxation, mass segregation from equipartition of energy, stellar collisions, stellar mergers, and core collapse. In the present review, we summarize the tremendous developments, as much theoretical as observational, that have taken place during the last two decades, and which have led to a quantum jump in our understanding of these beautiful dynamical systems.

The exotic chemical composition of the sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy

Abstract: Context. The Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy is the nearest neighbor of the Milky Way. Moving along a short period quasi-polar orbit within the Halo, it is being destroyed by the tidal interaction with our Galaxy, losing its stellar content along a huge stellar stream. Aims. We study the detailed chemical composition of 12 giant stars in the Sagittarius dwarf Spheroidal main body, together with 5 more in the associated globular cluster Terzan 7, by means of high resolution VLT-UVES spectra. Methods. Abundances are derived for up to 21 elements from O to Nd, by fitting lines EW or line profiles against ATLAS 9 model atmospheres and SYNTHE spectral syntheses calculated ad-hoc. Temperatures are derived from (V-I)(0) or (B-V)(0) colors and gravities from Fe I - Fe II ionization equilibrium. Results. The metallicity of the observed stars is between [Fe/H] = -0.9 and 0. We detected a highly peculiar "chemical signature", with undersolar alpha elements, Na, Al, Sc, V, Co, Ni, Cu, and Zn, among others, and overabundant La, Ce, and Nd. Many of these abundance ratios (in particular light-odd elements and iron peak ones) are strongly at odds with what is observed within the Milky Way, so they may be a very useful tool for recognizing populations originating within the Sagittarius dwarf. This can be clearly seen in the case of the globular Palomar 12, which is believed to have been stripped from Sagittarius: the cluster shows precisely the same chemical "oddities", thus finally confirming its extragalactic origin.

Triaxial orbit based galaxy models with an application to the (apparent) decoupled core galaxy NGC 4365

Abstract: We present a flexible and efficient method to construct triaxial dynamical models of galaxies with a central black hole, using Schwarzschild's orbital superposition approach. Our method is general and can deal with realistic luminosity distributions, which project to surface brightness distributions that may show position angle twists and ellipticity variations. The models are fit to measurements of the full line-of-sight velocity distribution (wherever available). We verify that our method is able to reproduce theoretical predictions of a three-integral triaxial Abel model. In a companion paper by Ven, de Zeeuw & van den Bosch, we demonstrate that the method recovers the phase-space distribution function. We apply our method to two-dimensional observations of the E3 galaxy NGC 4365, obtained with the integral-field spectrograph SAURON, and study its internal structure, showing that the observed kinematically decoupled core is not physically distinct from the main body and the inner region is close to oblate axisymmetric.

Discovery of Extended Blue Horizontal Branches in Two Metal-rich Globular Clusters*

Abstract: We have used WFPC2 to construct B, V color-magnitude diagrams of four metal-rich globular clusters, NGC 104 (47 Tuc), NGC 5927, NGC 6388, and NGC 6441 All four clusters have well populated red horizontal branches (RHB), as expected for their metallicity However, NGC 6388 and 6441 also exhibit a prominent blue horizontal-branch (BHB) extension, including stars reaching as faint in V as the turnoff luminosity This discovery demonstrates directly for the first time that a major population of hot horizontal-branch (HB) stars can exist in old, metal-rich systems This may have important implications for the interpretation of the integrated spectra of elliptical galaxies The cause of the phenomenon remains uncertain We examine the possibility that NGC 6388 and 6441 are older than the other clusters, but a simple difference in age may not be sufficient to produce the observed distributions along the HB The high central densities in NGC 6388 and 6441 suggest that the existence of the BHB tails might be caused by stellar interactions in the dense cores of these clusters, which we calculate to have two of the highest collision rates among globular clusters in the Galaxy Tidal collisions might act in various ways to enhance loss of envelope mass and therefore populate the blue side of the HB However, the relative frequency of tidal collisions does not seem large enough (compared to that of the clusters with pure RHBs) to account for such a drastic difference in HB morphology While a combination of an age difference and dynamical interactions may help, prima facie the lack of a radial gradient in the BHB/RHB star ratio seems to argue against dynamical effects playing a role