Context. The most recent determination of the solar chemical composition, using a time-dependent, 3D hydrodynamical model of the solar atmosphere, exhibits a significant decrease of C, N, O abundances compared to their previous values. Solar models that use these new abundances are not consistent with helioseismological determinations of the sound speed profile, the surface helium abundance and...

Over the years we have collected a large collection of Haskell programs written by students in a firstyear functional programming course using the Helium compiler. The mining of such a collection is not trivial, especially since the programming was done in vivo, and hence largely outside our control. We have developed a library in Haskell, called NEON, for computing characteristics of this coll...

Cryogenically cooled buffer gas beam sources of the molecule thorium monoxide (ThO) are optimized and characterized. Both helium and neon buffer gas sources are shown to produce ThO beams with high flux, low divergence, low forward velocity, and cold internal temperature for a variety of stagnation densities and nozzle diameters. The beam operates with a buffer gas stagnation density of ∼10(15)...

Using energy eigenfunctions obtained by semi-empirical analysis of the Lu-Fano plot of energy level positions and employing the Coulomb approximation of Bates and Damgaard, we calculate absolute line strengths for transitions between the neon two-channel Rydberg series 2p(P3/2,1/2)ns J = 1 and 2p (P3/2,1/2)n′ p J = 0 for n, n’ = 3,4. Each Rydberg series is analyzed separately to obtain a set of...

The fine-structure lines of singly ([Ne II] 12.8 μm) and doubly ([Ne III] 15.6 μm) ionized neon are among the most prominent features in the mid-infrared spectra of star-forming regions, and have the potential to be a powerful new indicator of the star formation rate in galaxies. Using a sample of star-forming galaxies with measurements of the fine-structure lines available from the literature,...

Monte Carlo calculations of the Ne Kα line fluoresced by coronal x-rays and emitted near the temperature minimum region of the solar atmosphere have been employed to investigate the use of this feature to measure directly the solar photospheric Ne abundance. Though very weak, comparison with spectral line databases indicates that at plasma temperatures typical of the quiet Sun and cool active r...