Day 323

Saturday.  Catching up.

1210.8150
CALIFA, the Calar Alto legacy integral field area survey: II. First public data release
CALIFA collaboration

First public data release of CALIFA survey; consists of science-grade optical datacubes for the first 100 of eventually 600 nearby (0.005<z<0.03) galaxies, obtained with the integral-field spectrograph PMAS/PPak at the 3.5m Calar Alto observatory.  DR1 covers a wide range of properties in color-magnitude space, morphological type, stellar mass, and gas ionization conditions.  Offers potential to tackle a variety of open questions in galaxy evolution using spatially resolved spectroscopy.  Two different spectral setups are available for each galaxy: (i) low-res V500 setup covering 3745-7500A with a spectral resolution of 6.0A FWHM, and (ii) med-res V1200 setup covering 3650-4840A with 2.3A FWHM resolution.  Present characteristics, data structure for scientific use of CALIFA data.  r and g band surface brightness of 23.6/23.4 mag/arcsec2.  Median spatial resolution is 3.7", absolute spectrophotometric calibration better than 15% (1 sigma).  

1210.8151
Proper motions and origins of SGR 1806-20 and SGR 1900+14
Tendulkar, Cameron, Kulkarni

5 years of high-res IR observations of the magnetars.  Transverse movement away from star clusters, solidifies proposed associations.  Estimate "breaking index" [?], is lower than simple magnetic dipole spin-down.

1210.8152
Compact binary progenitors of short gamma-ray bursts
Giacomazzo, et al

SGRB progenitors: NS2 or NS-BH mergers; production of spinning BH with accreting torus, which may power SGRBs.  Connect observation and numerical sims; constrain mass of powering tori.  Find: tori has mass < 0.01 Msun, favoring "high-mass" binary NS mergers (binaries with total masses > 1.5 the maximum mass of an isolated NS), which do not form a long-lived hypermassive NS after the merger.  While NS-BH systems cannot be excluded to be the engine of at least some of the SGRBs,the BH would need to have an initial spin of ~0.9 or higher.

1210.8156
CFHTLenS: the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Lensing Survey - Imaging data and catalogue products
Erben, Hildebrandt, Miller, van Waerbeke, Heymans, Hoekstra, Kitching, Mellier, Benjamin, Blake, Bonnet ... et al

Data product presentation.