Several generalizations of the well-known fluid model of Braginskii (1965) are considered. We use the Landau collisional operator and the moment method of Grad. We focus on the 21-moment model that is analogous to the Braginskii model, and we also consider a 22-moment model. Both models are formulated for general multispecies plasmas with arbitrary masses and temperatures, where all of the fluid moments are described by their evolution equations. The 21-moment model contains two "heat flux vectors" (third- and fifth-order moments) and two "viscosity tensors" (second- and fourth-order moments). The Braginskii model is then obtained as a particular case of a one ion–electron plasma with similar temperatures, with decoupled heat fluxes and viscosity tensors expressed in a quasistatic approximation. We provide all of the numerical values of the Braginskii model in a fully analytic form (together with the fourth- and fifth-order moments). For multispecies plasmas, the model makes the calculation of the transport coefficients straightforward. Formulation in fluid moments (instead of Hermite moments) is also suitable for implementation into existing numerical codes. It is emphasized that it is the quasistatic approximation that makes some Braginskii coefficients divergent in a weakly collisional regime. Importantly, we show that the heat fluxes and viscosity tensors are coupled even in the linear approximation, and that the fully contracted (scalar) perturbations of the fourth-order moment, which are accounted for in the 22-moment model, modify the energy exchange rates. We also provide several appendices, which can be useful as a guide for deriving the Braginskii model with the moment method of Grad.

The Lomb–Scargle periodogram is a well-known algorithm for detecting and characterizing periodic signals in unevenly sampled data. This paper presents a conceptual introduction to the Lomb–Scargle periodogram and important practical considerations for its use. Rather than a rigorous mathematical treatment, the goal of this paper is to build intuition about what assumptions are implicit in the use of the Lomb–Scargle periodogram and related estimators of periodicity, so as to motivate important practical considerations required in its proper application and interpretation.

To date, 241 individual molecular species, composed of 19 different elements, have been detected in the interstellar and circumstellar medium by astronomical observations. These molecules range in size from two atoms to 70 and have been detected across the electromagnetic spectrum from centimeter wavelengths to the ultraviolet. This census presents a summary of the first detection of each molecular species, including the observational facility, wavelength range, transitions, and enabling laboratory spectroscopic work, as well as listing tentative and disputed detections. Tables of molecules detected in interstellar ices, external galaxies, protoplanetary disks, and exoplanetary atmospheres are provided. A number of visual representations of these aggregate data are presented and briefly discussed in context.

We determine the low-redshift X-ray luminosity function, active black hole mass function (BHMF), and Eddington ratio distribution function (ERDF) for both unobscured (Type 1) and obscured (Type 2) active galactic nuclei (AGNs), using the unprecedented spectroscopic completeness of the BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS) data release 2. In addition to a straightforward 1/V_max approach, we also compute the intrinsic distributions, accounting for sample truncation by employing a forward-modeling approach to recover the observed BHMF and ERDF. As previous BHMFs and ERDFs have been robustly determined only for samples of bright, broad-line (Type 1) AGNs and/or quasars, ours are the first directly observationally constrained BHMF and ERDF of Type 2 AGNs. We find that after accounting for all observational biases, the intrinsic ERDF of Type 2 AGNs is significantly more skewed toward lower Eddington ratios than the intrinsic ERDF of Type 1 AGNs. This result supports the radiation-regulated unification scenario, in which radiation pressure dictates the geometry of the dusty obscuring structure around an AGN. Calculating the ERDFs in two separate mass bins, we verify that the derived shape is consistent, validating the assumption that the ERDF (shape) is mass-independent. We report the local AGN duty cycle as a function of mass and Eddington ratio, by comparing the BASS active BHMF with the local mass function for all supermassive black holes. We also present the $\mathrm{log}N-\mathrm{log}S$ of the Swift/BAT 70 month sources.

There are many open questions about prebiotic chemistry in both planetary and exoplanetary environments. The increasing number of known exoplanets and other ultra-cool, substellar objects has propelled the desire to detect life and prebiotic chemistry outside the solar system. We present an ion–neutral chemical network constructed from scratch, Stand2015, that treats hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen chemistry accurately within a temperature range between 100 and 30,000 K. Formation pathways for glycine and other organic molecules are included. The network is complete up to H6C2N2O3. Stand2015 is successfully tested against atmospheric chemistry models for HD 209458b, Jupiter, and the present-day Earth using a simple one-dimensional photochemistry/diffusion code. Our results for the early Earth agree with those of Kasting for CO₂, H₂, CO, and O₂, but do not agree for water and atomic oxygen. We use the network to simulate an experiment where varied chemical initial conditions are irradiated by UV light. The result from our simulation is that more glycine is produced when more ammonia and methane is present. Very little glycine is produced in the absence of any molecular nitrogen and oxygen. This suggests that the production of glycine is inhibited if a gas is too strongly reducing. Possible applications and limitations of the chemical kinetics network are also discussed.

A complete accounting of nearby objects—from the highest-mass white dwarf progenitors down to low-mass brown dwarfs—is now possible, thanks to an almost complete set of trigonometric parallax determinations from Gaia, ground-based surveys, and Spitzer follow-up. We create a census of objects within a Sun-centered sphere of 20 pc radius and check published literature to decompose each binary or higher-order system into its separate components. The result is a volume-limited census of ∼3600 individual star formation products useful in measuring the initial mass function across the stellar (<8M_⊙) and substellar (≳5M_Jup) regimes. Comparing our resulting initial mass function to previous measurements shows good agreement above 0.8M_⊙ and a divergence at lower masses. Our 20 pc space densities are best fit with a quadripartite power law, $\xi (M)={dN}/{dM}\propto {M}^{-\alpha }$, with long-established values of α = 2.3 at high masses (0.55 < M < 8.00M_⊙), and α = 1.3 at intermediate masses (0.22 < M < 0.55M_⊙), but at lower masses, we find α = 0.25 for 0.05 < M < 0.22M_⊙, and α = 0.6 for 0.01 < M < 0.05M_⊙. This implies that the rate of production as a function of decreasing mass diminishes in the low-mass star/high-mass brown dwarf regime before increasing again in the low-mass brown dwarf regime. Correcting for completeness, we find a star to brown dwarf number ratio of, currently, 4:1, and an average mass per object of 0.41 M_⊙.

The value of the eclipse solar radius during the 2017 August 21 total solar eclipse was estimated to be S_⊙ = (95995 ± 005) at 1 au with no significant dependence on wavelength. The measurement was obtained from analysis of a video of the eclipse flash spectrum recorded at the southern limit of the umbral shadow path. Our analysis was conducted by extracting light curves from the flash spectrum and comparing them to simulated light curves. The simulations were performed by integrating the limb darkening function over the exposed area of the photosphere. These numerical integrations relied on very precise computations of the relative movement of the lunar and solar limbs.

With the advent of more sensitive all-sky instruments, the transient universe is being probed in greater depth than ever before. Taking advantage of available resources, we have established a comprehensive database of black hole (and black hole candidate) X-ray binary (BHXB) activity between 1996 and 2015 as revealed by all-sky instruments, scanning surveys, and select narrow-field X-ray instruments on board the INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, Monitor of All-Sky X-ray Image, Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, and Swift telescopes; the Whole-sky Alberta Time-resolved Comprehensive black-Hole Database Of the Galaxy or WATCHDOG. Over the past two decades, we have detected 132 transient outbursts, tracked and classified behavior occurring in 47 transient and 10 persistently accreting BHs, and performed a statistical study on a number of outburst properties across the Galactic population. We find that outbursts undergone by BHXBs that do not reach the thermally dominant accretion state make up a substantial fraction (∼40%) of the Galactic transient BHXB outburst sample over the past ∼20 years. Our findings suggest that this "hard-only" behavior, observed in transient and persistently accreting BHXBs, is neither a rare nor recent phenomenon and may be indicative of an underlying physical process, relatively common among binary BHs, involving the mass-transfer rate onto the BH remaining at a low level rather than increasing as the outburst evolves. We discuss how the larger number of these "hard-only" outbursts and detected outbursts in general have significant implications for both the luminosity function and mass-transfer history of the Galactic BHXB population.

Molecular lines are powerful diagnostics of the physical and chemical properties of the interstellar medium (ISM). These ISM properties, which affect future star formation, are expected to differ in starburst galaxies from those of more quiescent galaxies. We investigate the ISM properties in the central molecular zone of the nearby starburst galaxy NGC 253 using the ultrawide millimeter spectral scan survey from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array Large Program ALCHEMI. We present an atlas of velocity-integrated images at a 16 resolution of 148 unblended transitions from 44 species, including the first extragalactic detection of HCNH⁺ and the first interferometric images of C₃H⁺, NO, and HCS⁺. We conduct a principal component analysis (PCA) on these images to extract correlated chemical species and to identify key groups of diagnostic transitions. To the best of our knowledge, our data set is currently the largest astronomical set of molecular lines to which PCA has been applied. The PCA can categorize transitions coming from different physical components in NGC 253 such as (i) young starburst tracers characterized by high-excitation transitions of HC₃N and complex organic molecules versus tracers of on-going star formation (radio recombination lines) and high-excitation transitions of CCH and CN tracing photodissociation regions, (ii) tracers of cloud-collision-induced shocks (low-excitation transitions of CH₃OH, HNCO, HOCO⁺, and OCS) versus shocks from star formation-induced outflows (high-excitation transitions of SiO), as well as (iii) outflows showing emission from HOC⁺, CCH, H₃O⁺, CO isotopologues, HCN, HCO⁺, CS, and CN. Our findings show these intensities vary with galactic dynamics, star formation activities, and stellar feedback.

We present preliminary trigonometric parallaxes of 184 late-T and Y dwarfs using observations from Spitzer (143), the U.S. Naval Observatory (18), the New Technology Telescope (14), and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (9). To complete the 20 pc census of ≥T6 dwarfs, we combine these measurements with previously published trigonometric parallaxes for an additional 44 objects and spectrophotometric distance estimates for another 7. For these 235 objects, we estimate temperatures, sift into five 150 K wide T_eff bins covering the range 300–1050 K, determine the completeness limit for each, and compute space densities. To anchor the high-mass end of the brown dwarf mass spectrum, we compile a list of early- to mid-L dwarfs within 20 pc. We run simulations using various functional forms of the mass function passed through two different sets of evolutionary code to compute predicted distributions in T_eff. The best fit of these predictions to our L, T, and Y observations is a simple power-law model with α ≈ 0.6 (where ${dN}/{dM}\propto {M}^{-\alpha }$), meaning that the slope of the field substellar mass function is in rough agreement with that found for brown dwarfs in nearby star-forming regions and young clusters. Furthermore, we find that published versions of the log-normal form do not predict the steady rise seen in the space densities from 1050 to 350 K. We also find that the low-mass cutoff to formation, if one exists, is lower than ∼5 M_Jup, which corroborates findings in young, nearby moving groups and implies that extremely low-mass objects have been forming over the lifetime of the Milky Way.

This paper is the first in a series of papers that prepare and analyze spectral and other properties for a database of already-discovered changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL AGNs). Here we focus on the spectral fitting and analysis of broad emission lines in a sample of 93 CL AGNs collected from the literature with existing Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)/Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS)/extended-BOSS spectroscopy where the Hβ emission-line profile does not completely disappear in any epochs. Additionally, we have gathered older/newer spectral epochs from all the available SDSS data releases to make the database more complete. We use PyQSOFit and perform a homogeneous spectral decomposition of all of our SDSS spectra and tabulate the AGN continuum and emission-line properties per epoch per source, chronologically. This further allows us to categorize the sources in our sample as Turn-On or Turn-Off and subsequently check for repeated occurrences of such phases. We then estimate the black hole mass (M_BH) and the Eddington ratio (λ_Edd) per epoch per source where the required parameters are available and well estimated. We demonstrate the movement of the source in the M_BH–λ_Edd plane, allowing us to check for systematic changes in the source's fundamental properties. We then track their transition along the optical plane of the Eigenvector 1 schema and categorize sources that either stay within the same population (A or B) or make an interpopulation movement as a function of spectral epoch. We also test the Balmer decrement (Hα/Hβ) of a subset of our sample of CL AGNs as a function of time and AGN luminosity.

Solar active regions (ARs) are areas on the Sun with very strong magnetic fields where various activities take place. Prominences are one of the typical solar features in the solar atmosphere, whose eruptions often lead to solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Therefore, studying their morphological features and their relationship with solar activity is useful in predicting eruptive events and in understanding the long-term evolution of solar activities. A huge amount of data have been collected from various ground-based telescopes and satellites. The massive amounts of data make human inspection difficult. For this purpose, we developed an automated detection method for prominences and ARs above the solar limb based on deep-learning techniques. We applied it to process the 304 Å data obtained by SDO/AIA from 2010 May 13 to 2020 December 31. Besides the butterfly diagrams and latitudinal migrations of the prominences and ARs during solar cycle 24, the variations of their morphological features (such as the locations, areas, heights, and widths) with the calendar years and the latitude bands were analyzed. Most of these statistical results based on our new method are in agreement with previous studies, which also guarantees the validity of our method. The N–S asymmetry indices of the prominences and ARs show that the northern hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere in solar cycle 24, except for 2012–2015, and 2020 for ARs. The high-latitude prominences show much stronger N–S asymmetry, where the northern hemisphere is dominant in ∼2011 and ∼2015, and the southern hemisphere is dominant from 2016–2019.

We use the spectroscopic data collected by the Magellanic Quasars Survey (MQS) and the photometric V- and I-band data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) to measure the physical parameters for active galactic nuclei (AGNs) located behind the Magellanic Clouds. The flux-uncalibrated MQS spectra were obtained with the 4 m Anglo-Australian Telescope and the AAOmega spectroscope (R = 1300) in a typical ∼1.5 hr visit. They span a spectral range of 3700–8500 Å and have signal-to-noise ratios in a range of 3–300. We report the discovery and observational properties of 161 AGNs in this footprint, which expands the total number of spectroscopically confirmed AGNs by MQS to 919. After the conversion of the OGLE mean magnitudes to the monochromatic luminosities at 5100, 3000, and 1350 Å, we were able to reliably measure the black hole masses for 165 out of 919 AGNs. The remaining physical parameters we provide are the bolometric luminosities and the Eddington ratios. A fraction of these AGNs have been observed by the OGLE survey since 1997 (all of them since 2001), enabling studies of correlations between the variability and physical parameters of these AGNs.

We implement an algorithm based on the weighted stacking of astronomical images that can combine different observations of the same region of the sky removing the interfering signals. We develop a C++ code that takes as input a set of spectral cubes and computes the local weights of the intensity for each pixel of every channel. The weights are calculated as the inverse variance of the nearby pixels and are used to compute the weighted merge of the input files. Astronomical sources, present in all cubes, are preserved by the weighted average. However, interfering signals, present in specific cubes and a certain frequency range, are down-weighted in the average and removed from the output spectral cube. We present the results obtained by analyzing simulated spectral cubes containing astronomical sources, noise, and a random set of interferences of different intensities and spectral occupations. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by comparing the output result with the input sky-model image. Finally, we present the results obtained by applying the method to a set of real data consisting of observations of the Andromeda galaxy, Messier 31 (M31), at 6.6 GHz obtained with the Sardinia Radio Telescope.

We introduce Weakhub, a novel neutrino microphysics library that provides opacities and kernels beyond conventional interactions used in the literature. This library includes neutrino–matter, neutrino–neutrino interactions and plasma process, along with corresponding weak and strong corrections. A full kinematics approach is adopted for the calculations of β-processes, incorporating various weak corrections and medium modifications due to the nuclear equation of state. Calculations of plasma processes, electron neutrino–antineutrino annihilation, and nuclear de-excitation are also included. We also present the detailed derivations of weak interactions and the coupling to the two-moment based general-relativistic multigroup radiation transport in the general-relativistic multigrid numerical (Gmunu) code. We compare the neutrino opacity spectra for all interactions and estimate their contributions at hydrodynamical points in core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star (BNS) postmerger remnants, and predict the effects of improved opacities in comparison to conventional ones for a BNS postmerger at a specific hydrodynamical point. We test the implementation of the conventional set of interactions by comparing it to an open-source neutrino library NuLib in a core-collapse supernova simulation. We demonstrate good agreement with discrepancies of less than ∼10% in luminosity for all neutrino species, while also highlighting the reasons contributing to the differences. To compare the advanced interactions to the conventional set in core-collapse supernova modeling, we perform simulations to analyze their impacts on neutrino signatures, hydrodynamical behaviors, and shock dynamics, showing significant deviations.