• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.129-137
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• 2021

It has been established that the acoustic mode parameters of the Sun and Sun-like stars vary over activity cycles. Since the observed variations are not consistent with an activity-related origin, even Sun-like stars showing out-of-phase changes of mode frequencies and amplitudes need to be carefully studied using other observational quantities. In order to test whether the presumed relations between the global seismic parameters are a signature of the stellar activity cycle, we analyze the photometric light curve of HD 49933 for which the first direct detection of an asteroseismic signature for activity-induced variations in a Sun-like star was made, using observations by the CoRoT space telescope. We find that the amplitude of the envelope significantly anti-correlates with both the maximum frequency of the envelope and the width of the envelope unless superflare-like events completely contaminate the light curve. However, even though the photometric proxy for stellar magnetic activity appears to show relations with the global asteroseismic parameters, they are statistically insignificant. Therefore, we conclude that the global asteroseismic parameters can be utilized in cross-checking asteroseismic detections of activity-related variations in Sun-like stars, and that it is probably less secure and effective to construct a photometric magnetic activity proxy to indirectly correlate the global asteroseismic parameters. Finally, we seismically estimate the mass of HD 49933 based on our determination of the large separation of HD 49933 with evolutionary tracks computed by the MESA code and find a value of about 1.2M_☉ and a sub-solar metallicity of Z = 0.008, which agrees with the current consensus and with asteroseismic and non-asteroseismic data.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.207-214
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• 2018

A coelostat is often used for solar observations, because it corrects the image rotation automatically by guiding sunlight into a fixed telescope with two plane mirrors. For the purposes of education and spectroscopic observation, the solar group at Seoul National University (SNU) plans to develop the SNU coelostat (SNUC) and install it in the SNU Astronomical Observatory (SAO). Requirements of the SNUC are < 1" positioning accuracy with 30 cm beam size on the entrance pupil in the compact dome. To allow for installation in the small dome, we design a compact slope type coelostat with a 45 cm primary plane mirror and a 39 cm secondary plane mirror. The motion of the SNUC is minimized by fixing the position of the slope frame. Numerical simulations of the available observational time of the designed coelostat shows that the sun can be observed ay all times from June to early August and at least three hours in other months. Since the high accuracy driving motors installed in the SNUC can be affected by external environment factors such as humidity and temperature variations, we design a prototype to test the significance of these effects. The prototype consists of a 20 cm primary plane mirror, a 1 m slope rail, a direct drive motor, a ballscrew, a linear motion guide, an AC servo motor, a reduction gear and a linear encoder. We plan to control and test the accuracy of the prototype with varying atmospheric conditions in early 2019. After testing the prototype, the SNUC will be manufactured and installed in SAO by 2020.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.53.1-53.1
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• 2019

We apply a non-equilibrium ionization (NEI) model to a supra-arcade plasma sheet, shocked plasma, and current sheet. The model assumes that the plasma is initially in ionization equilibrium at low temperature, and it is heated rapidly by a shock or magnetic reconnection. The model presents the temperature and characteristic timescale responses of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board Solar Dynamic Observatory and X-ray Telescope (XRT) on board Hinode. We compare the model ratios of the responses between different passbands with the observed ratios of a supra-arcade plasma sheet on 2012 January 27. We find that most of observations are able to be described by using a combination of temperatures in equilibrium and the plasma closer to the arcade may be close to equilibrium ionization. We also utilize the set of responses to estimate the temperature and density for shocked plasma associated with a coronal mass ejection on 2010 June 13. The temperature, density, and the line of sight depth ranges we obtain are in reasonable agreement with previous works. However, a detailed model of the spherical shock is needed to fit the observations. We also compare the model ratios with the observations of a current sheet feature on 2017 September 10. The long extended current sheet above the solar limb makes it easy to analyze the sheet without background corona. We find that the sheet feature is far from equilibrium ionization while the background plasma is close to equilibrium. We discuss our results with the previous studies assuming equilibrium ionization.

• Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.55 no.2
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• pp.37-57
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• 2022

Using I-band images of 35 nearby (z < 0.1) type 1 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) obtained with Hubble Space Telescope, selected from the 70-month Swift-BAT X-ray source catalog, we investigate the photometric properties of the host galaxies. With a careful treatment of the point-spread function (PSF) model and imaging decomposition, we robustly measure the I-band brightness and the effective radius of bulges in our sample. Along with black hole (BH) mass estimates from single-epoch spectroscopic data, we present the relation between BH mass and I-band bulge luminosity (M_BH-M_I,bul relation) of our sample AGNs. We find that our sample lies offset from the M_BH-M_I,bul relation of inactive galaxies by 0.4 dex, i.e., at a given bulge luminosity, the BH mass of our sample is systematically smaller than that of inactive galaxies. We also demonstrate that the zero point offset in the M_BH-M_I,bul relation with respect to inactive galaxies is correlated with the Eddington ratio. Based on the Kormendy relation, we find that the mean surface brightness of ellipticals and classical bulges in our sample is comparable to that of normal galaxies, revealing that bulge brightness is not enhanced in our sample. As a result, we conclude that the deviation in the M_BH-M_I,bul relation from inactive galaxies is possibly because the scaling factor in the virial BH mass estimator depends on the Eddington ratio.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.53.4-54
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• 2021

Although the era of very large telescopes has come, small telescopes still have advantages for fast follow-up and long-term monitoring observation. Intensive monitoring survey of nearby galaxies (IMSNG) aims to understand the nature of the supernovae (SNe) by catching the early light curve from them with the network of small telescopes from 0.4-m to 1.0-m all around the world. To achieve the scientific goals with heterogeneous facilities, three factors are important. First, automatic processes as soon as data is uploaded will increase efficiency and shorten the time. Second, searching for transients is necessary to deal with newly emerged transients for fast follow-up observation. Finally, the Integrated process for different telescopes gives a homogeneous output, which will eventually make connections with the database easy. Here, we introduce the integrated pipeline, 'gppy' based on Python, for more than 10 facilities having various configurations and its performance. Processes consist of image pre-process, photometry, image align, image combine, photometry, and transient search. In the connected database, homogeneous output is summarized and analyzed additionally to filter transient candidates with light curves. This talk will suggest the future work to improve the performance and usability on the other projects, gravitational wave electromagnetic wave counterpart in Korea Observatory (GECKO), and small telescope network of Korea (SOMANGNET).

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.65.2-66
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• 2021

Observational studies of supernova (SN) feedback are limited. In our galaxy, most supernova remnants (SNRs) are located in the Galactic plane, so there is contamination from foreground/background sources. SNRs located in other galaxies are too far, so we cannot study them in detail. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a unique place to study the SN feedback due to their proximity, which makes possible to study the structure of individual SNRs in some detail together with their environment. Recently, we carried out a systematic study of 13 LMC SNRs using [P II] (1.189 ㎛) and [Fe II] (1.257 ㎛) narrowband imaging with SIRIUS/IRSF, four SNRs (SN 1987A, N158A, N157B and N206), show [P II]/[Fe II] ratio much higher than the cosmic abundance. While the high ratio of SN 1987A could be due to enhanced abundance in SN ejecta, we do not have a clear explanation for the other cases. We investigate the [P II] knots found in SNRs N206, N157B and N158A, using optical spectra obtained last November with GMOS-S mounted on Gemini-South telescope. We detected several emission lines (e.g., H I, [O I], He I, [O III], [N II] and [S II]) that are present in all three SNRs, among other lines that are only found in some of them (e.g., [Ne III], [Fe III] and [Fe II]). Various line ratios are measured from the three SNRs, which indicate that the ratios of N157B tend to differ from those of other two SNRs. We will use the abundances of He and N (from the detection of [N II] and He I emission lines), together with velocity measurements to tell whether the origin of the [P II] knots are SN ejecta or CSM/ISM. For this purpose we have built a family of radiative shock with self-consistent pre-ionization using MAPPINGS 5.1.18, with shock velocities in the range of 100 to 475 km/s. We will compare the observed and modeled line fluxes for different depletion factors.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.46.1-46.1
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• 2021

Hydrated asteroids get widespread attention for the evolution of water in the Solar System, especially thanks to the recent successes of the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx space missions. The target asteroids of these missions are believed to be fragments that have experienced aqueous alteration in their parent bodies [3]. Although hydrated asteroids have been studied well via spectroscopy, focusing on the 0.7 um or the 2.7 um absorption bands [2, 3, 4], polarimetric properties of these asteroids have rarely been investigated. In this study, we conducted a polarimetric observation of 18 C-complex main-belt asteroids with the 1.6-m Pirka telescope at the Nayoro Observatory of Hokkaido University, Japan. We used a polarimetric imaging mode of the Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) with the standard Rc-band filter (the central wavelength at 0.64 um) [5]. As a result, we found that all of these hydrated asteroids indicate deep negative branches of their polarimetric profiles. Accordingly, the hydrated asteroids have the polarization minima (Pmin), whose values are significantly lower than any other taxonomic types of asteroids (including C-group asteroids). Because Pmin depends on albedo, particle size, and porosity of the surface materials [1], we suspect that hydrated asteroids are distinctive from other asteroids in terms of these physical properties. In this presentation, we introduce our polarimetric observation and findings. We discuss why hydrated asteroids indicate such low Pmin values, comparing Pmin with spectral features at 0.7 um and 2.7 um based on the observation results.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.61.4-62
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• 2020

We present H I gas kinematics and star formation activities of NGC 6822, a dwarf galaxy located in the Local Volume at a distance of ~490 kpc. We perform profile decomposition of the line-of-sight velocity profiles of the high-resolution (~42.4" × 12") spatial; ~1.6 km/s spectral) H I data cube taken with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). For this, we use a new tool, the so-called BAYGAUD (BAYesian GAUssian Decompositor) which is based on Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques, allowing us to decompose a line-of-sight velocity profile into an optimal number of Gaussian components in a quantitative manner. We classify the decomposed H I gas components of NGC 6822 into kinematically cold, warm or hot ones with respect to their velocity dispersion: 1) cold: < 4 km/s, 2) warm: 4 ~ 8 km/s, 3) hot: > 8 km/s. We then derive the Toomre-Q parameters of NGC 6822 using the kinematically decomposed H I gas maps. We also correlate their gas surface densities with the surface star formation rates derived using both GALEX far-ultraviolet and WISE 22 micron data to examine the impact of gas turbulence caused by stellar feedback on the Kennicutt-Schmidt (K-S) law. The kinematically cold component is likely to better follow the linear extension of the Kennicutt-Schmidt (K-S) law for molecular hydrogen (H2) at the low gas surface density regime where H I is not saturated.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.227-240
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• 1999

We performed CCD photometric observations of W UMa type contact binary BV Dra during eight nights from May 1996 to June 1999 using 61cm telescope at Sobaeksan Optical Astronomy Observatory, and completed BV R light curves of the system. From our observations, we derived nine new times of minimum lights (five timings for primary eclipse, four for secondary) and determined new light elements with the times of minima observed since 1999. Our BV R light curves and Batten & Lu(1986)'s radial-velocity ones were simultaneously analyzed with contact mode (Mode 3) of Wilson-Devinney's binary model, and the photometric and spectroscopic solutions for BV Dra were solved. In the analysis, we derived the solutions of 1999 light curves with and without spots, respectively. As the results, asymmetry of light curves may be interpreted as produced by the existence of two spots; hot spot on the secondary and cool on the primary. Combining solutions of light curves and radial-velocity ones, absolute dimensions of BV Dra are $M_1=0.40M_{odot}$, $M_2=1.01M_{odot}$, $R_1=0.72R_{odot}$, $R_2=0.40R_{odot}$. In mass-radius diagram, the less massive and hotter primary component of BV Dra is near TAMS and the secondary is near ZAMS, which is very similar to the other W-type W UMa binaries.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.67-74
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• 2002

Optical observations of Geostationary and Molynia orbit spin-stabilized satellites over the Korean peninsula have been carried out at the Kyung Hee University Observatory with a 30 inch telescope. We have observed 5 spin-stabilized satellites, and obtained 0spin periods, which can be used for deducing a design for each bus model. Verifications of spin periods of 3 known satellites from manufacturer, and observations of 2 unknown satellites were made. The difference between known spin periods and observed spin periods is 0.06sec on the average and the difference of those spin rates is 3.3rpm on the average. Those results indicate that spin periods and spin rates of observed geostationary spin-stabilized satellites are within operating limits. Spin rates of unknown satellites, Fengyun 2B and Molynia 1-87 are 89.3rpm, 78.4rpm earh. It is suggested that the research of spin stabilized satellites can be used for the determinations of standard light sources for short period celestial objects and helpful for the constructions of satellite databases with photometric and/or spectroscopic satellite observations.