arXiv subjects

Yongjun Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Yongjun Chen.

50 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Structural and spectral properties of Galactic plane variable radio sources

In the time domain, the radio sky in particular along the Galactic plane direction may vary significantly because of various energetic activities associated with stars, stellar and supermassive black holes. Using multi-epoch Very Large Array surveys of the Galactic plane at 5.0 GHz, Becker et al. (2010) presented a catalogue of 39 variable radio sources in the flux density range 1-70 mJy. To probe their radio structures and spectra, we observed 17 sources with the very-long-baseline interferometric (VLBI) imaging technique and collected additional multi-frequency data from the literature. We detected all of the sources at 5 GHz with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, but only G23.6644-0.0372 with the European VLBI Network (EVN). Together with its decadal variability and multi-frequency radio spectrum, we interpret it as an extragalactic peaked-spectrum source with a size of <~10 pc. The remaining sources were resolved out by the long baselines of the EVN because of either strong scatter broadening at the Galactic latitude <1 deg or intrinsically very extended structures on centi-arcsec scales. According to their spectral and structural properties, we find that the sample has a diverse nature. We notice two young H II regions and spot a radio star and a candidate planetary nebula. The rest of the sources are very likely associated with radio active galactic nuclei (AGN). Two of them also displays arcsec-scale faint jet activity. The sample study indicates that AGN are commonplace even among variable radio sources in the Galactic plane.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2021

Event Horizon Telescope observations of the jet launching and collimation in Centaurus A

Very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations of active galactic nuclei at millimeter wavelengths have the power to reveal the launching and initial collimation region of extragalactic radio jets, down to $10-100$ gravitational radii ($r_g=GM/c^2$) scales in nearby sources. Centaurus A is the closest radio-loud source to Earth. It bridges the gap in mass and accretion rate between the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in Messier 87 and our galactic center. A large southern declination of $-43^{\circ}$ has however prevented VLBI imaging of Centaurus A below $λ1$cm thus far. Here, we show the millimeter VLBI image of the source, which we obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope at $228$GHz. Compared to previous observations, we image Centaurus A's jet at a tenfold higher frequency and sixteen times sharper resolution and thereby probe sub-lightday structures. We reveal a highly-collimated, asymmetrically edge-brightened jet as well as the fainter counterjet. We find that Centaurus A's source structure resembles the jet in Messier 87 on ${\sim}500r_g$ scales remarkably well. Furthermore, we identify the location of Centaurus A's SMBH with respect to its resolved jet core at $λ1.3$mm and conclude that the source's event horizon shadow should be visible at THz frequencies. This location further supports the universal scale invariance of black holes over a wide range of masses.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

The Variability of the Black-Hole Image in M87 at the Dynamical Time Scale

The black-hole images obtained with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are expected to be variable at the dynamical timescale near their horizons. For the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, this timescale (5-61 days) is comparable to the 6-day extent of the 2017 EHT observations. Closure phases along baseline triangles are robust interferometric observables that are sensitive to the expected structural changes of the images but are free of station-based atmospheric and instrumental errors. We explored the day-to-day variability in closure phase measurements on all six linearly independent non-trivial baseline triangles that can be formed from the 2017 observations. We showed that three triangles exhibit very low day-to-day variability, with a dispersion of $\sim3-5^\circ$. The only triangles that exhibit substantially higher variability ($\sim90-180^\circ$) are the ones with baselines that cross visibility amplitude minima on the $u-v$ plane, as expected from theoretical modeling. We used two sets of General Relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations to explore the dependence of the predicted variability on various black-hole and accretion-flow parameters. We found that changing the magnetic field configuration, electron temperature model, or black-hole spin has a marginal effect on the model consistency with the observed level of variability. On the other hand, the most discriminating image characteristic of models is the fractional width of the bright ring of emission. Models that best reproduce the observed small level of variability are characterized by thin ring-like images with structures dominated by gravitational lensing effects and thus least affected by turbulence in the accreting plasmas.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2021

Modeling Dynamic Attributes for Next Basket Recommendation

Traditional approaches to next item and next basket recommendation typically extract users' interests based on their past interactions and associated static contextual information (e.g. a user id or item category). However, extracted interests can be inaccurate and become obsolete. Dynamic attributes, such as user income changes, item price changes (etc.), change over time. Such dynamics can intrinsically reflect the evolution of users' interests. We argue that modeling such dynamic attributes can boost recommendation performance. However, properly integrating them into user interest models is challenging since attribute dynamics can be diverse such as time-interval aware, periodic patterns (etc.), and they represent users' behaviors from different perspectives, which can happen asynchronously with interactions. Besides dynamic attributes, items in each basket contain complex interdependencies which might be beneficial but nontrivial to effectively capture. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Attentive network to model Dynamic attributes (named AnDa). AnDa separately encodes dynamic attributes and basket item sequences. We design a periodic aware encoder to allow the model to capture various temporal patterns from dynamic attributes. To effectively learn useful item relationships, intra-basket attention module is proposed. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Contrastive Self-supervised Sequential Recommendation with Robust Augmentation

Sequential Recommendationdescribes a set of techniques to model dynamic user behavior in order to predict future interactions in sequential user data. At their core, such approaches model transition probabilities between items in a sequence, whether through Markov chains, recurrent networks, or more recently, Transformers. However both old and new issues remain, including data-sparsity and noisy data; such issues can impair the performance, especially in complex, parameter-hungry models. In this paper, we investigate the application of contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) to the sequential recommendation, as a way to alleviate some of these issues. Contrastive SSL constructs augmentations from unlabelled instances, where agreements among positive pairs are maximized. It is challenging to devise a contrastive SSL framework for a sequential recommendation, due to its discrete nature, correlations among items, and skewness of length distributions. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for sequential Recommendation (CoSeRec). We introduce two informative augmentation operators leveraging item correlations to create high-quality views for contrastive learning. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on improving model performance and the robustness against sparse and noisy data. Our implementation is available online at \url{https://github.com/YChen1993/CoSeRec}

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Constraints on black-hole charges with the 2017 EHT observations of M87*

Our understanding of strong gravity near supermassive compact objects has recently improved thanks to the measurements made by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). We use here the M87* shadow size to infer constraints on the physical charges of a large variety of nonrotating or rotating black holes. For example, we show that the quality of the measurements is already sufficient to rule out that M87* is a highly charged dilaton black hole. Similarly, when considering black holes with two physical and independent charges, we are able to exclude considerable regions of the space of parameters for the doubly-charged dilaton and the Sen black holes.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2021

The Polarized Image of a Synchrotron Emitting Ring of Gas Orbiting a Black Hole

Synchrotron radiation from hot gas near a black hole results in a polarized image. The image polarization is determined by effects including the orientation of the magnetic field in the emitting region, relativistic motion of the gas, strong gravitational lensing by the black hole, and parallel transport in the curved spacetime. We explore these effects using a simple model of an axisymmetric, equatorial accretion disk around a Schwarzschild black hole. By using an approximate expression for the null geodesics derived by Beloborodov (2002) and conservation of the Walker-Penrose constant, we provide analytic estimates for the image polarization. We test this model using currently favored general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of M87*, using ring parameters given by the simulations. For a subset of these with modest Faraday effects, we show that the ring model broadly reproduces the polarimetric image morphology. Our model also predicts the polarization evolution for compact flaring regions, such as those observed from Sgr A* with GRAVITY. With suitably chosen parameters, our simple model can reproduce the EVPA pattern and relative polarized intensity in Event Horizon Telescope images of M87*. Under the physically motivated assumption that the magnetic field trails the fluid velocity, this comparison is consistent with the clockwise rotation inferred from total intensity images.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2020

Gravitational Test Beyond the First Post-Newtonian Order with the Shadow of the M87 Black Hole

The 2017 Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) observations of the central source in M87 have led to the first measurement of the size of a black-hole shadow. This observation offers a new and clean gravitational test of the black-hole metric in the strong-field regime. We show analytically that spacetimes that deviate from the Kerr metric but satisfy weak-field tests can lead to large deviations in the predicted black-hole shadows that are inconsistent with even the current EHT measurements. We use numerical calculations of regular, parametric, non-Kerr metrics to identify the common characteristic among these different parametrizations that control the predicted shadow size. We show that the shadow-size measurements place significant constraints on deviation parameters that control the second post-Newtonian and higher orders of each metric and are, therefore, inaccessible to weak-field tests. The new constraints are complementary to those imposed by observations of gravitational waves from stellar-mass sources.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2020

The radio properties of the OH megamaser galaxy IRAS 02524+2046

We present results from VLBI observations of continuum and OH line emission in IRAS 02524+2046 and also arcsecond-scale radio properties of this galaxy using VLA archive data. We found that there is no significant detection of radio continuum emission from VLBI observations. The arcsecond-scale radio images of this source show no clear extended emission, the total radio flux density at L and C band are around 2.9 mJy and 1.0 mJy respectively, which indicate a steep radio spectral index between the two band. Steep spectral index, low brightness temperature and high $q$-ratio (the FIR to the radio flux density), which are three critical indicators in classification of radio activity in the nuclei of galaxies, are all consistent with the classification of this source as a starburst galaxy from its optical spectrum. The high-resolution line profile show that both of \textbf{the 1665 and 1667 MHz OH maser} line have been detected which show three and two clear components respectively. The channel maps show that the maser emission are distributed in a region $\sim$ 210 pc $\times$ 90 pc, the detected maser components at different region show similar double spectral feature, which might be an evidence that this galaxy is at a stage of major merger as seen from the optical morphology.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2019

Learning Graph Pooling and Hybrid Convolutional Operations for Text Representations

With the development of graph convolutional networks (GCN), deep learning methods have started to be used on graph data. In additional to convolutional layers, pooling layers are another important components of deep learning. However, no effective pooling methods have been developed for graphs currently. In this work, we propose the graph pooling (gPool) layer, which employs a trainable projection vector to measure the importance of nodes in graphs. By selecting the k-most important nodes to form the new graph, gPool achieves the same objective as regular max pooling layers operating on images. Another limitation of GCN when used on graph-based text representation tasks is that, GCNs do not consider the order information of nodes in graph. To address this limitation, we propose the hybrid convolutional (hConv) layer that combines GCN and regular convolutional operations. The hConv layer is capable of increasing receptive fields quickly and computing features automatically. Based on the proposed gPool and hConv layers, we develop new deep networks for text categorization tasks. Our results show that the networks based on gPool and hConv layers achieves new state-of-the-art performance as compared to baseline methods.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2018

The pc-scale radio structure of MIR-observed radio galaxies

We investigated the relationship between the accretion process and jet properties by ultilizing the VLBA and mid-infrared (MIR) data for a sample of 45 3CRR radio galaxies selected with a flux density at 178 MHz $>16.4$ Jy, 5 GHz VLA core flux density $\geq$ 7 mJy, and MIR observations. The pc-scale radio structure at 5 GHz are presented by using our VLBA observations for 21 sources in February, 2016, the analysis on the archival data for 16 objects, and directly taking the measurements for 8 radio galaxies available in literatures. The accretion mode is constrained from the Eddington ratio with a dividing value of 0.01, which is estimated from the MIR-based bolometric luminosity and the black hole masses. While most FRII radio galaxies have higher Eddington ratio than FRIs, we found that there is indeed no single correspondence between the FR morphology and accretion mode with eight FRIIs at low accretion and two FRIs at high accretion rate. There is a significant correlation between the VLBA core luminosity at 5 GHz and the Eddington ratio. Various morphologies are found in our sample, including core only, single-sided core-jet, and two-sided core-jet structures. We found that the higher accretion rate may be more likely related with the core-jet structure, thus more extended jet. These results imply that the higher accretion rates are likely able to produce more powerful jets. There is a strong correlation between the MIR luminosity at 15 $μ$m and VLBA 5 GHz core luminosity, in favour of the tight relation between the accretion disk and jets. In our sample, the core brightness temperature ranges from $10^{9}$ to $10^{13.38}$ K with a median value of $10^{11.09}$ K indicating that systematically the beaming effect may not be significant....

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2017

Dense Transformer Networks

The key idea of current deep learning methods for dense prediction is to apply a model on a regular patch centered on each pixel to make pixel-wise predictions. These methods are limited in the sense that the patches are determined by network architecture instead of learned from data. In this work, we propose the dense transformer networks, which can learn the shapes and sizes of patches from data. The dense transformer networks employ an encoder-decoder architecture, and a pair of dense transformer modules are inserted into each of the encoder and decoder paths. The novelty of this work is that we provide technical solutions for learning the shapes and sizes of patches from data and efficiently restoring the spatial correspondence required for dense prediction. The proposed dense transformer modules are differentiable, thus the entire network can be trained. We apply the proposed networks on natural and biological image segmentation tasks and show superior performance is achieved in comparison to baseline methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

The Radio Properties of Radio-Loud Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 Galaxies on Parsec Scales

We present the detection of compact radio structures of fourteen radio-loud narrow line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) galaxies from Very Long Baseline Array observations at 5 GHz, which were performed in 2013. While 50\% of the sources of our sample show a compact core only, the remaining 50\% exhibit a core-jet structure. The measured brightness temperatures of the cores range from $10^{8.4}$ to $10^{11.4}$ K with a median value of $10^{10.1}$ K, indicating that the radio emission is from non-thermal jets, and that, likely, most sources are not strongly beamed, then implying a lower jet speed in these radio-loud NLS1 galaxies. In combination with archival data taken at multiple frequencies, we find that seven sources show flat or even inverted radio spectra, while steep spectra are revealed in the remaining seven objects. Although all these sources are very radio-loud with $R > 100$, their jet properties are diverse, in terms of their milli-arcsecond (mas) scale (pc scale) morphology and their overall radio spectral shape. The evidence for slow jet speeds (i.e., less relativistic jets), in combination with the low kinetic/radio power, may offer an explanation for the compact VLBA radio structure in most sources. The mildly relativistic jets in these high accretion rate systems are consistent with a scenario, where jets are accelerated from the hot corona above the disk by the magnetic field and the radiation force of the accretion disk. Alternatively, a low jet bulk velocity can be explained by low spin in the Blandford-Znajek mechanism.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2010

The compact radio structure of radio-loud narrow line Seyfert 1 galaxies

We present the compact radio structure of three radio-loud narrow line Seyfert 1 galaxies from VLBA archive data at 2.3, 5 and 8.4 GHz. In RXS J16290+4007, the radio structure is mostly unresolved. The combination of compact radio structure, high brightness temperature and inverted spectrum between simultaneous 2.3 and 8.4 GHz, strongly favors jet relativistic beaming. Combining with the VLBI data at 1.6 and 8.4 GHz from literatures, we argued that RXS J16333+4718 may also harbor a relativistic jet, with resolved core-jet structure in 5 GHz. B3 1702+457 is clearly resolved with well defined jet component. The overall radio steep spectrum indicates that B3 1702+457 is likely a source optically defined as NLS1 with radio definition of compact steep spectrum sources. From these three sources, we found that radio loud NLS1s can be either intrinsically radio loud (e.g. B3 1702+457), or apparently radio loud due to jet beaming effect (e.g. RXS J16290+4007 and RXS J16333+4718).

astro-ph.CO↗