The MASSIVE Survey - VIII. Stellar Velocity Dispersion Profiles and Environmental Dependence of Early-Type Galaxies

We measure the radial profiles of the stellar velocity dispersions, $\sigma(R)$, for 90 early-type galaxies (ETGs) in the MASSIVE survey, a volume-limited integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) galaxy survey targeting all northern-sky ETGs with absolute $K$-band magnitude $M_K < -25.3$ mag, or stellar mass $M_* > 4 \times 10^{11} M_\odot$, within 108 Mpc. Our wide-field 107" $\times$ 107" IFS data cover radii as large as 40 kpc, for which we quantify separately the inner (2 kpc) and outer (20 kpc) logarithmic slopes $\gamma_{\rm inner}$ and $\gamma_{\rm outer}$ of $\sigma(R)$. While $\gamma_{\rm inner}$ is mostly negative, of the 56 galaxies with sufficient radial coverage to determine $\gamma_{\rm outer}$ we find 36% to have rising outer dispersion profiles, 30% to be flat within the uncertainties, and 34% to be falling. The fraction of galaxies with rising outer profiles increases with $M_*$ and in denser galaxy environment, with 10 of the 11 most massive galaxies in our sample having flat or rising dispersion profiles. The strongest environmental correlations are with local density and halo mass, but a weaker correlation with large-scale density also exists. The average $\gamma_{\rm outer}$ is similar for brightest group galaxies, satellites, and isolated galaxies in our sample. We find a clear positive correlation between the gradients of the outer dispersion profile and the gradients of the velocity kurtosis $h_4$. Altogether, our kinematic results suggest that the increasing fraction of rising dispersion profiles in the most massive ETGs are caused (at least in part) by variations in the total mass profiles rather than in the velocity anisotropy alone.Comment: Accepted/in press, MNRA

The MASSIVE Survey - VII. The Relationship of Angular Momentum, Stellar Mass and Environment of Early-Type Galaxies

We analyse the environmental properties of 370 local early-type galaxies (ETGs) in the MASSIVE and ATLAS3D surveys, two complementary volume-limited integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) galaxy surveys spanning absolute $K$-band magnitude $-21.5 > M_K > -26.6$, or stellar mass $8 \times 10^{9} < M_* < 2 \times 10^{12} M_\odot$. We find these galaxies to reside in a diverse range of environments measured by four methods: group membership (whether a galaxy is a brightest group/cluster galaxy, satellite, or isolated), halo mass, large-scale mass density (measured over a few Mpc), and local mass density (measured within the $N$th neighbour). The spatially resolved IFS stellar kinematics provide robust measurements of the spin parameter $\lambda_e$ and enable us to examine the relationship among $\lambda_e$, $M_*$, and galaxy environment. We find a strong correlation between $\lambda_e$ and $M_*$, where the average $\lambda_e$ decreases from $\sim 0.4$ to below 0.1 with increasing mass, and the fraction of slow rotators $f_{\rm slow}$ increases from $\sim 10$% to 90%. We show for the first time that at fixed $M_*$, there are almost no trends between galaxy spin and environment; the apparent kinematic morphology-density relation for ETGs is therefore primarily driven by $M_*$ and is accounted for by the joint correlations between $M_*$ and spin, and between $M_*$ and environment. A possible exception is that the increased $f_{\rm slow}$ at high local density is slightly more than expected based only on these joint correlations. Our results suggest that the physical processes responsible for building up the present-day stellar masses of massive galaxies are also very efficient at reducing their spin, in any environment.Comment: Accepted to MNRA

Detecting Sarcasm in Multimodal Social Platforms

Sarcasm is a peculiar form of sentiment expression, where the surface sentiment differs from the implied sentiment. The detection of sarcasm in social media platforms has been applied in the past mainly to textual utterances where lexical indicators (such as interjections and intensifiers), linguistic markers, and contextual information (such as user profiles, or past conversations) were used to detect the sarcastic tone. However, modern social media platforms allow to create multimodal messages where audiovisual content is integrated with the text, making the analysis of a mode in isolation partial. In our work, we first study the relationship between the textual and visual aspects in multimodal posts from three major social media platforms, i.e., Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter, and we run a crowdsourcing task to quantify the extent to which images are perceived as necessary by human annotators. Moreover, we propose two different computational frameworks to detect sarcasm that integrate the textual and visual modalities. The first approach exploits visual semantics trained on an external dataset, and concatenates the semantics features with state-of-the-art textual features. The second method adapts a visual neural network initialized with parameters trained on ImageNet to multimodal sarcastic posts. Results show the positive effect of combining modalities for the detection of sarcasm across platforms and methods.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, final version published in the Proceedings of ACM Multimedia 201

The MASSIVE Survey - X. Misalignment between Kinematic and Photometric Axes and Intrinsic Shapes of Massive Early-Type Galaxies

We use spatially resolved two-dimensional stellar velocity maps over a $107"\times 107"$ field of view to investigate the kinematic features of 90 early-type galaxies above stellar mass $10^{11.5}M_\odot$ in the MASSIVE survey. We measure the misalignment angle $\Psi$ between the kinematic and photometric axes and identify local features such as velocity twists and kinematically distinct components. We find 46% of the sample to be well aligned ($\Psi < 15^{\circ}$), 33% misaligned, and 21% without detectable rotation (non-rotators). Only 24% of the sample are fast rotators, the majority of which (91%) are aligned, whereas 57% of the slow rotators are misaligned with a nearly flat distribution of $\Psi$ from $15^{\circ}$ to $90^{\circ}$. 11 galaxies have $\Psi \gtrsim 60^{\circ}$ and thus exhibit minor-axis ("prolate") rotation in which the rotation is preferentially around the photometric major axis. Kinematic misalignments occur more frequently for lower galaxy spin or denser galaxy environments. Using the observed misalignment and ellipticity distributions, we infer the intrinsic shape distribution of our sample and find that MASSIVE slow rotators are consistent with being mildly triaxial, with mean axis ratios of $b/a=0.88$ and $c/a=0.65$. In terms of local kinematic features, 51% of the sample exhibit kinematic twists of larger than $20^{\circ}$, and 2 galaxies have kinematically distinct components. The frequency of misalignment and the broad distribution of $\Psi$ reported here suggest that the most massive early-type galaxies are mildly triaxial, and that formation processes resulting in kinematically misaligned slow rotators such as gas-poor mergers occur frequently in this mass range.Comment: Accepted to MNRA

Sigurðar saga fóts (The Saga of Sigurðr Foot): A Translation

This is the first English translation of the short Icelandic romance Sigurðar saga fóts, with an introduction presenting the evidence for its dating and immediate literary context. Like most Icelandic romances, Sigurðar saga is a bridal-quest story; the support of a foster-brother is key to the hero winning the bride; and the foster-brothers start out as opponents before recognising their mutual excellence and swearing foster-brotherhood. Uniquely, however, the men who become foster-brothers begin by competing for the same bride (Signý): the eponymous Sigurðr fótr wins Signý only because Ásmundr gives her to him in exchange for foster-brotherhood. Ásmundr’s decision can be read as demonstrating with unusual starkness the superior importance in much Icelandic romance of homosocial relationships over heterosexual ones, giving the saga a certain paradigmatic status. Translating the saga in an open-access forum and reconstructing its literary context will, we hope, encourage further analyses

Sigurðar saga fóts (The Saga of Sigurðr Foot): A Translation

This is the first English translation of the short Icelandic romance Sigurðar saga fóts, with an introduction presenting the evidence for its dating and immediate literary context. Like most Icelandic romances, Sigurðar saga is a bridal-quest story; the support of a foster-brother is key to the hero winning the bride; and the foster-brothers start out as opponents before recognising their mutual excellence and swearing foster-brotherhood. Uniquely, however, the men who become foster-brothers begin by competing for the same bride (Signý): the eponymous Sigurðr fótr wins Signý only because Ásmundr gives her to him in exchange for foster-brotherhood. Ásmundr’s decision can be read as demonstrating with unusual starkness the superior importance in much Icelandic romance of homosocial relationships over heterosexual ones, giving the saga a certain paradigmatic status. Translating the saga in an open-access forum and reconstructing its literary context will, we hope, encourage further analyses

An Aesthetic of Resourcefulness: Japanese Folk Textiles from the Edo Period and Beyond

This paper describes the place in time - the vernacular context in social, economic, cultural and geographic terms - in which specific utilitarian textiles -- sakiori, shifu and boro -- were produced in Japan from, roughly, the Edo (or Tokugawa), through the Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods, or 1600 to the mid-1900\u27s. Sakiori, shifu and boro clothing and household textiles incorporated re-purposed, recycled fibers and materials in response to conditions of poverty and harsh living conditions in rural Japan. These utilitarian artifacts affect particular aesthetic qualities, reflective of the conditions within which they were originally produced, and are resonant, to some contemporary audiences, in their simplicity and humility of a late 20th and early 21st century modernist sensibility

The MASSIVE Survey. VI. The spatial sistribution and kinematics of warm ionized gas in the most massive local early-type galaxies

We present the first systematic investigation of the existence, spatial distribution, and kinematics of warm ionized gas as traced by the [O ii] 3727 Å emission line in 74 of the most massive galaxies in the local universe. All of our galaxies have deep integral-field spectroscopy from the volume- and magnitude-limited MASSIVE survey of early-type galaxies with stellar mass $\mathrm{log}({M}_{* }/{M}_{\odot })\gt 11.5$ (M K < −25.3 mag) and distance D < 108 Mpc. Of the 74 galaxies in our sample, we detect warm ionized gas in 28, which yields a global detection fraction of 38 ± 6% down to a typical [O ii] equivalent width limit of 2 Å. MASSIVE fast rotators are more likely to have gas than MASSIVE slow rotators with detection fractions of 80 ± 10% and 28 ± 6%, respectively. The spatial extents span a wide range of radii (0.6–18.2 kpc; 0.1–4R e ), and the gas morphologies are diverse, with 17/28 ≈ 61 ± 9% being centrally concentrated, 8/28 ≈ 29 ± 9% exhibiting clear rotation out to several kiloparsecs, and 3/28 ≈ 11 ± 6% being extended but patchy. Three out of four fast rotators show kinematic alignment between the stars and gas, whereas the two slow rotators with robust kinematic measurements available exhibit kinematic misalignment. Our inferred warm ionized gas masses are roughly ~105 M ⊙. The emission line ratios and radial equivalent width profiles are generally consistent with excitation of the gas by the old underlying stellar population. We explore different gas origin scenarios for MASSIVE galaxies and find that a variety of physical processes are likely at play, including internal gas recycling, cooling out of the hot gaseous halo, and gas acquired via mergers

Chiral and herringbone symmetry breaking in water-surface monolayers

We report the observation from monolayers of eicosanoic acid in the L′2 phase of three distinct out-of-plane first-order diffraction peaks, indicating molecular tilt in a nonsymmetry direction and hence the absence of mirror symmetry. At lower pressures the molecules tilt in the direction of their nearest neighbors. In this region we find a structural transition, which we tentatively identify as the rotator-herringbone transition L2d−L2h