Kavli Affiliate: George Efstathiou | Summary:High-mass X-ray binaries are one of the primary drivers of the 21-cm signal from Cosmic Dawn and Reionization, playing a leading role in the thermal history of the intergalactic medium. In traditional semi-numerical simulations, a deterministic scaling relation between the total X-ray luminosity of high-mass X-ray binaries, $L_rm X$, and […]
Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved LLM reasoning, but models often generate explanations that appear coherent while containing unfaithful intermediate steps. Existing self-evaluation approaches are prone to inherent biases: the model may confidently endorse coherence even when the step-to-step implication is not valid, leading to unreliable faithfulness evaluation. We propose FACT-E, a […]
Kavli Affiliate: Luis Ho | Summary:Sagittarius A* (Srg A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, provides a unique laboratory to study accretion dynamics and plasma processes near the event horizon. We investigated the variability and polarization properties of Srg A* using ALMA observations during the 2018 Event Horizon Telescope campaign. […]
Kavli Affiliate: Kejia Lee | Summary:The radiative mechanism of coherent radio emission has remained an enigma since the discovery of pulsars, even the emergence of fast radio bursts (FRBs), which exhibit similarities to the single-pulse behavior of pulsars and have opened a new view for deciphering the long-standing mystery. Besides tremendous efforts in modelling, advanced […]
Kavli Affiliate: Sara Seager | Summary:It is unclear how directly imaged substellar companions with masses near the deuterium burning limit form, because these objects are rare and their bulk properties are not diagnostic of their formation. In this paper we revisit this problem using JWST/NIRCam coronagraphic images of the 29 Cygni (=HIP 99770) system that […]
Kavli Affiliate: Daniel R. Wilkins | Summary:Recent XRISM observations of active galactic nuclei such as PDS 456 have revealed “forests” of absorption lines best modeled by five distinct absorption zones with varying large blueshifts. We propose a model in which these relativistic blueshifts originate from the motion of the accretion disc itself, rather than from […]
Kavli Affiliate: Feng Long| Summary: Comparing $K$-sample distributions is a fundamental problem in data science that arises in a wide variety of fields and applications. In this article, we introduce a maximum-of-differences approach to make such comparisons. Specifically, we first calculate the pairwise distances from the pooled observations of the $K$ samples. We then define […]
Kavli Affiliate: Roberto Maiolino | Summary:JWST has revealed a large population of massive black holes (BHs) in the early Universe with unusual properties which mark them as distinct from low-redshift active galactic nuclei. Such findings have prompted the development of new models of BH formation and growth, and of their co-evolution with host galaxies. Linking […]
Kavli Affiliate: Feng Long| Summary: Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by vision language models (VLMs) are rapidly moving from passive assistance to autonomous operation. However, this unrestricted action space exposes users to severe and irreversible financial, privacy or social harm. Existing safeguards rely on prompt engineering, brittle heuristics and VLM-as-critic lack formal verification and […]
Kavli Affiliate: Gregory Herczeg | Summary:We present the 1.6$-$28 $μ$m spectra of the young protostar EC 53, obtained with JWST NIRSpec IFU and MIRI MRS during the quiescent and burst phases of its periodic brightness variations. To isolate ice absorption features, we modeled and removed the mid-infrared silicate dust absorption using a dedicated continuum-fitting procedure. […]