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# Nonradial pulsation of the 𝛿 Scuti star UV Trianguli

## 1 Introduction

The detection of multiple modes along with observational mode identifications raises the real possibility of performing rigorous asteroseismology on stars other than the Sun. Stellar oscillation frequencies are sensitive to stellar structure and the measurement of a full-set of frequencies should allow an understanding of the internal structure of a star. This is the way for us to gain insight into the internal stellar physics. $`\delta `$ Scuti stars are regularly pulsating variables situated in the lower classical Cepheid instability strip on or near the main sequence (MS). In general, the period range lies between 0.02 and 0.25 d and the spectral types range from A2 to F2. The majority of $`\delta `$ Sct stars pulsate with a number of nonradial $`p`$-modes simultaneously excited to low amplitudes, but some are (pure) radial pulsators with larger amplitudes and others pulsate in a mixture of radial and nonradial modes. The $`\delta `$ Sct stars have been proven to be a class of promising pulsators for asteroseismology (e.g. Templeton et al. 1997; Pamyatnykh et al. 1998; Breger et al. 1999; Michel et al. 1999; Templeton, Bradley & Guzik 2000). Therefore, it is necessary to detect as many oscillation frequencies as possible for individual stars. For this reason, the star UV Trianguli was selected as one of the targets of a mission dedicated to the investigations of poorly-studied $`\delta `$ Sct stars.

UV Tri (=GSC 02293-01382, $`\alpha _{2000}=01^\mathrm{h}32^\mathrm{m}00^\mathrm{s}.11`$, $`\delta _{2000}=+30^{}21^{}56^{\prime \prime }.7`$, $`V`$=11.2 mag, A3; Rodríguez, López-González & López de Coca 2000) was discovered to be a $`\delta `$ Sct star by Shaw et al. shaw (1983) when they observed its neighbour eclipsing binary V Tri. They found a period of $``$0.1 d and pointed out the possibility of multiple periods, but they could not give further results due to the deficiency of data. Hence UV Tri was observed from 1999 to 2001. We collected a number of CCD and photoelectric photometric data in the Johnson $`V`$ band, as well as some photoelectric data in Strömgren $`uvby\beta `$. We are interested in the behaviour of multiperiodicity and amplitude variability. A preliminary analysis based on part of the data showed that UV Tri is a low-amplitude biperiodic $`\delta `$ Sct pulsator. Two pulsation frequencies, $`f_1`$=9.3299 d-1 and $`f_2`$=10.8483 d-1 with semi-amplitudes of 0.026 and 0.010 mag, respectively, basically fit the light variations of UV Tri (Liu, Zhou & Rodríguez 2001).

In this paper, we perform a complete data analysis with the aims to explore additional pulsation frequencies and to check possible amplitude variations in the detected frequencies over the observing years. Section 2 contains an outline of the observational journal and data reduction. We derive the astrophysical parameters using the $`uvby\beta `$ indices in Section 4. An attempt is also made in this section to model the pulsations by calculating an appropriate stellar evolution and oscillation model. Our main results are discussed and summarized in Section 5.

## 2 Data acquisition

The $`V`$ and $`uvby`$ observations of UV Tri were secured at two observatories between 1999 November 17 and 2001 November 22. The data consist of 9378 measurements in Johnson $`V`$ band (165.1 h) and 55 in Strömgren $`uvby`$ colours, collected in 35 observing nights. Additionally, a few $`\beta `$ data were also obtained. A journal of the observations is given in Table 1.

### 2.1 Johnson $`V`$ photometry

From 1999 November 17 to 2000 January 14, Johnson $`V`$ photometry of UV Tri was obtained with the light-curve survey CCD photometer (Wei, Chen & Jiang 1990; Zhou et al. 2001) mounted on the 85-cm Cassegrain telescope at the Xinglong Station of the Beijing Astronomical Observatory (BAO) of China. The photometer employed a red-sensitive Thomson TH7882 576$`\times `$384 CCD with a whole imaging size of 13.25$`\times `$8.83 mm2 corresponding to a sky field of view of $`11^{}.5\times 7^{}.7`$, which allows sufficient stars to be toggled in a frame as reference. Depending on the nightly seeing the integration times varied from 20 to 60 s. During this observing run, the following reference stars in the field of UV Tri were simultaneously monitored: C1=GSC 02293-01028 was used as the main comparison star, C2=GSC 02293-01422, C3=GSC 02293-01027, C4=GSC 02293-01461, C5=GSC 02293-01456 and C6=GSC 02293-01021 were used as check stars. The magnitude differences between the reference stars yielded a typical accuracy of 0.010 to 0.006 mag. Before constructing differential time series for the target variable, special emphasis was made to ensure the constancy of the comparison stars. Consequently, GSC 02293-01021 was discovered to be a new W Ursae Majoris-type variable (Liu et al. 2000), while the others were detected as nonvariables within the observational errors. Finally the remained five reference stars were selected to produce differential magnitudes for the variable by taking their mean combination as UV Tri$``$(C1+C2+C3+C4+C5)/5. Atmospheric extinction was ignored because of the proximity between the selected objects. The procedures of data reduction, including on-line bias subtraction, dark reduction and flatfield correction, are outlined in Zhou et al. zhou01 (2001).

From 2000 October 24 to 2001 November 22, UV Tri was reobserved with the three-channel high-speed photoelectric photometer (Jiang & Hu 1998) attached to the same telescope. This detector is used in Whole Earth Telescope campaigns (WET; Nather et al. 1990). GSC 02293-01331 ($`\alpha _{2000}=01^\mathrm{h}32^\mathrm{m}12^\mathrm{s}.46`$, $`\delta _{2000}=+30^{}15^{}35^{\prime \prime }.8`$, $`V`$=10.71) was chosen as the comparison star. The variable, comparison star and sky background were simultaneously monitored in continuous 10-s intervals through a standard Johnson $`V`$ filter throughout the two observing seasons. The typical observational accuracy with the three-channel photometer is $``$0.005 mag (Zhou 2001). Most of the $`V`$ data have been merged into 60-s bins.

### 2.2 Strömgren $`uvby\beta `$ photometry

In 2000 simultaneous photometric $`uvby`$ observations of UV Tri were carried out using the six-channel $`uvby\beta `$ spectrograph photometer attached to the 90-cm telescope at the Observatorio de Sierra Nevada (OSN), Granada, Spain (Rodríguez et al. 1997). Additionally, a few data using the Crawford Hβ system were also collected. This colour photometry allows us the determination of the corresponding photometric indices and hence astrophysical parameters for the variable.

During these observations, HD 9483 ($`V`$=8.1, A3) was used as the main comparison star with HD 9445 ($`V`$=8.5, F0) and HD 8826 ($`V`$=8.0, F0) as check stars. The spectral types and colour indices of the three stars locate them inside the instability region of the $`\delta `$ Sct and/or $`\gamma `$ Dor type pulsators. However, during the observations reported here, no variability was detected for any of the comparison stars within the observational errors.

To transform our data into the standard system we have used the same procedure described in Rodríguez et al. (1997). In the present work 10 standard stars were observed for purposes of calibration. The standard deviations obtained in the transformation equations were 0.011, 0.007, 0.009, 0.009 and 0.008 mag for $`V`$, $`by`$, $`m_1`$, $`c_1`$ and $`\beta `$, respectively. The results, together with the standard deviations and the number of points collected for each object, are listed in Table 2. As can be seen, our results are in good agreement with those available in the bibliography (Hauck & Mermilliod 1998). Due to the small number of $`uvby`$ data, $`y`$ points were not merged into the $`V`$ data.

## 3 Data analysis

### 3.1 Frequency solution

To find a complete set of pulsation frequencies of UV Tri, we merged all the data collected from 1999 to 2001. The frequency analysis was carried out by using the programmes period98 (Breger 1990; Sperl 1998) and mfa (Hao 1991; Liu 1995), where single-frequency Fourier transforms and multifrequency least-squares fits were processed. The two programmes use the Discrete Fourier Transform method (Deeming 1975) and basically led to identical results. To judge whether or not a peak is significant in the amplitude spectra we followed the empirical criterion of Breger et al. (1993), that an amplitude signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio larger than 4.0 usually corresponds to an intrinsic peak of the variable. Hence the noise levels at each frequency were computed using the residuals at the original measurements with all the trial frequencies prewhitened. Then the confidence levels of the frequencies were estimated following Scargle (1982). Note that the S/N criterion assumes a good spectral window typical of multisite campaigns. However, in the case of single-site observations, the noise level can be enhanced by the spectral window patterns of the noise peaks and possible additional frequencies. Therefore a significant peak’s S/N value might be a little less than 4.0.

First, we need to check the constancy of the comparison star GSC 02293-01331 used in the photoelectric observations. Unfortunately, no differential photometry was made for it. We analysed the amplitude spectrum of the comparison star in the frequency range 0–50 d-1. The data from the 9 photometric nights on 2000 October 24, 25 and 31; November 1, 4, 12, 13, 14 and 20 were thus used. A forced Fourier analysis produced four peaks in the lower frequency region: 3.0125, 2.6722, 4.8577 and 1.7974 d-1 with amplitudes of 0.064, 0.025, 0.020 and 0.019 mag, respectively. We are unable to judge whether these peaks are or not intrinsic to the comparison star depending on their S/N values alone. The first (highest) peak at 3.0 d-1 is due to the atmospheric extinction, which could not be completely corrected in the case of lacking a check star. The other peaks might be mainly attributed to atmospheric or instrumental effects. We keep in mind that caution must be taken in detecting frequencies in the region lower than 4 d-1, as pointed out by Breger (1994), that 0–4 d-1 can be regarded as the garbage heap for observational problems such as incomplete extinction corrections and equipment changes. In order to reduce the low-frequency noise, these four frequencies have been removed from the differential measurements for UV Tri below.

Fourier analyses of all the data for UV Tri show two dominate frequencies at $`f_1`$=9.3298 d-1 and $`f_2`$=10.8513 d-1, verifying the previous detection (Liu et al. 2001) with an exception of the term at 3.6 d-1. Subsequent analyses of the residuals after prewhitening the two frequencies show that the domain in 0–7 d-1 was highly contaminated. The higher noise in the region lower than 4 d-1 mostly reflects the effects caused by instrumental drifts, atmospheric changes (e.g. irregularities in sky transparency and scintillation noise) and other similar phenomena not caused by the target star. For safety, we stopped searching for pulsation in this lower-frequency region. We have noted the existing aliases in the data by taking into account the integer multiples of 0.00137, 0.033 and 1.0 d-1 corresponding to two-year alias, monthly alias and daily alias, respectively. For the judgement of significant peaks the amplitude spectra and spectral window are shown in Fig. 1, in which each spectrum panel corresponds to the residuals with all the previous frequencies prewhitened. The last panel (‘Data – 2f’) shows the residuals after subtracting the fit of the two outstanding frequencies, together with the significance curve – a spline-connected points – four times the noise points obtained in a spacing of 0.2 d-1. The observational noise is frequency-dependent and it was defined as the average amplitude of the residuals in a range of 1 d-1 (11.57 $`\mu `$Hz), close to the frequency under consideration. As a final result, the pulsation frequencies $`f_1`$=9.3298 d-1 and $`f_2`$=10.8513 d-1 with amplitudes of 0.0254 and 0.010 mag, respectively, are confirmed to be intrinsic to UV Tri. So the variable is currently a biperiodic $`\delta `$ Sct pulsator. The two frequencies fit the light curves with a standard deviation of $`\sigma `$=0.013 mag. Fourier parameters of the best-fitting sinusoids are listed in Table 3, where the errors in frequencies, amplitudes and phases were estimated assuming the root-mean-square deviation of the observational noise to be of 0.013 mag, the standard deviation of the fit, through the formulae of Montgomery & O’Donoghue (1999). We used the real nights with data for the time baseline rather than the span of observations, so that the errors would not be underestimated. The differential light curves along with the fit are presented in Fig. 2.

From Figs. 1 and 2, the detection of pulsation frequencies seems not complete. The residual spectrum (‘Data – 2f’ panel in Fig. 1) is still not consistent with white noise. This indicates that other pulsation frequencies are possibly present in the data. Poor fits on some nights, such as HJD 2451842, 2451849 and 2451850, also show this possibility. The region around 10 d-1 might be affected by potential amplitude modulation of $`f_1`$ and $`f_2`$ and by additional frequencies very close to $`f_1`$. We noted a peak at 16.6862 d-1 ($`f_3`$) with an amplitude of 0.0031 mag (S/N = 3.4). It is probably a candidate frequency as its height is obviously higher than its neighbour peaks. Inspection of the light curves showed several peculiar cycles on HJD 2451843.1, 2451850.05, 24511851.12, 2451863.2 and 2452201.3, in which irregular portions of the light curves occurred on the ascending branches near the maxima. They were not fitted at all by the two detected frequencies. Fitting by taking $`f_3`$ into account did not reproduce these unusual cycles and did not improve the goodness of fitting remarkably. We paid close attention to these asymmetric shapes in the light curves because we found them immediately after the end of observations in those nights. These unusual cycles seemed not related with non-photometric conditions, instruments or the comparison star. They are probably real and aperiodic. The effect may be referred to a similar phenomenon of “anomalous cycles” reported by Paparó et al. (2000) in their study of the $`\delta `$ Sct star 57 Tauri. These authors described the phenomenon as single unusual cycles of light variation with larger amplitude than the surrounding cycles or with asymmetric shapes. Hence the amplitudes are larger than expected from multifrequency solution of the light curve. They also pointed out that another $`\delta `$ Sct star XX Pyxidis seems to show anomalous cycles. However, Handler (2001) argued that the hypothesis that XX Pyx shows anomalous cycles is quite unlikely. Handler suggested that single anomalous cycles of $`\delta `$ Sct stars are physically implausible. The possibility of anomalous cycles occurring in pulsating stars should not be dismissed on superficial grounds, but the evidence for it needs to be accumulated and critically scrutinized. The case of anomalous cycles in UV Tri, which needs further observational check, supports the suggestion that the phenomenon is intrinsic to $`\delta `$ Sct stars. Investigation of possible causes and implications of the anomalous cycles becomes more interesting.

### 3.2 Frequency and amplitude variability

It is possible to search the data for amplitude and/or frequency variability on an annual time-scale for UV Tri. We divided the data into three subsets according to the observing gaps: data set ‘1999’ included measurements collected between 1999 November 17 and 2000 January 14 (5 nights), data set ‘2000’ from 2000 October 24 to November 20 (19 nights), while ‘2001’ for those in 2001 (8 nights). Individual Fourier analyses were then carried out for each subset. However, we are aware that the Fourier results highly depend on the data structure, i.e. the number of data points, sampling rate, time span, etc. Furthermore, Fourier analysis assumes the frequency and amplitude of a signal to be constant in the time domain. Therefore, our results for the time-dependence of frequency and amplitude should be regarded as the averaged values during the investigated period. Given the trial frequency values of $`f_1`$=9.3298 d-1 and $`f_2`$=10.8513 d-1, non-linear least-squares sinusoidal fit to each data set were made. Our results are presented in Table 4, where the errors were estimated following the methods in previous section. The standard deviations of fit for the three subsets are $`\sigma `$=0.0115, 0.0118 and 0.0108 mag, respectively. The fitting quality is generally consistent among the three solutions. As can be seen, the two frequencies were constant in 1999–2001 within the calculated errors.

By fixing the two frequencies $`f_1`$=9.3298 d-1 and $`f_2`$= 10.8513 d-1 and allowing their amplitudes and phases to change, we obtained the amplitudes of both frequencies for different years’ data. The details are given in Table 5. In the estimated errors range, there is still a difference of the values of the amplitude of $`f_1`$ between Tables 4 and 5. Other values are basically consistent with each other. One reason causing this difference probably is the shortest data in 1999 because the results in Table 4 are the least-squares optimised values of all three Fourier parameters of the two frequencies. While the results in Table 5 are the optimised values of amplitude and phase when the frequencies are fixed. Compared with the results in Table 3 obtained for the overall data sets, which are shown as the solid line in Fig. 2, the amplitudes calculated in Table 5 are more certain and reasonable than in Table 4. We did not see anomalous cycles in the light curves of 1999. Deviations between fits and light curves are relatively smaller in the 1999 data set than in other two sets. The overall frequency solution is good enough for the 1999 data set. We believe anomalous cycles did not affect the amplitude in 1999. The error for amplitudes in 1999 may be underestimated due to shorter data length. However, even in Table 5, the amplitude of $`f_2`$ in 1999 is obviously higher than in other two years. In 2000 and 2001, there are many cycles covered by the observations, so we think that a few disturbances (i.e. the anomalous cycles) among so many cycles is not enough to affect the amplitude. Consequently, from Tables 4 and 5 we think that the amplitude of $`f_1`$ did not change during these three years, but the amplitude of $`f_2`$ is larger in 1999 than those in 2000 and 2001. In view of the higher noise around 10 d-1 in the amplitude spectra, amplitude variability as a cause cannot be ignored and it deserves further investigation.

## 4 Properties of UV Tri

In this section, we derive the stellar properties of UV Tri.

### 4.1 Physical parameters from $`uvby\beta `$ indices

An estimate of stellar physical parameters including absolute magnitude, surface gravity, effective temperature and other quantities can be derived by applying suitable calibrations for $`uvby\beta `$ photometry. Using the observed colour indices obtained in the present work (Table 2), we can deredden these indices making use of the dereddening formulae and calibrations for A stars given by Crawford (1979). This way, we derive a colour excess of $`E(by)`$=0.048 mag and the following intrinsic indices: $`(by)_0`$=0.167, $`m_0`$=0.185 and c0=0.774 mag. Furthermore, deviations from the zero age main sequence values of $`\delta `$$`m_0`$=0.009 and $`\delta `$c0=0.044 mag are also found. These values suggest this variable to be a normal Population I $`\delta `$ Sct star with normal abundance in metals and well-situated into the $`\delta `$ Sct region in the H-R diagram as can be seen from fig. 8 of Rodríguez & Breger (2001). In fact, a value of the mean metal abundance of \[Me/H\]=$``$0.014 dex (or Z=0.019) can be derived using the calibrations by Smalley (1993) for metallicity of A-type stars with $`\delta `$$`m_0`$=0.009 mag. We note here that the spectral type of UV Tri, A3, the same as that of V Tri, was estimated by Shaw et al. (1983). No one spectroscopically-determined type is available.

We further derived the effective temperature, surface gravity, bolometric magnitude and radius: $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}=7480\pm 150`$ K, $`\mathrm{log}g=4.06\pm 0.06`$, $`M_{\mathrm{bol}}=2.46\pm 0.20`$ mag ($`M_V=2.44\pm 0.20`$ mag) and $`R`$=1.74$`\pm `$0.23 R. We used $`\beta `$, which is free of interstellar extinction effects, as the independent parameter for measuring temperature (Crawford 1979). The effective temperature and gravity were determined from the model-atmosphere calibrations of $`uvby\beta `$ photometry by Moon & Dworetsky (1985). The bolometric magnitude was found at normal metal abundance. A bolometric correction, B.C.=0.02 mag, derived from Malagnini et al. (1986) for $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$=7480 K was assumed. The radius value was calculated by the radiation law. For the B.C., Balona (1994) gives 0.05$`\pm `$0.047 mag for the temperature, so the bolometric magnitude of UV Tri becomes: $`M_{\mathrm{bol}}`$ = 2.49$`\pm `$0.25 mag ($`\mathrm{log}L/L_{\mathrm{}}`$ = 0.90$`\pm `$0.10). The two values are in agreement within the error range. Following Crawford & Mandwewala (1976) the interstellar reddening is 0.21 mag for the colour excess of $`E(by)`$=0.048 mag. Consequently, a distance modulus D.M.=8.4$`\pm `$0.2 mag was obtained.

Moreover, it is possible to gain some insight into the mass and age of this star using the evolutionary tracks of Claret (1995) for solar abundances. In this case, values of an evolutionary mass $`M`$=1.78$`\pm `$0.1 M, a bolometric magnitude $`M_{\mathrm{bol}}`$=2.03$`\pm `$0.3 mag and an age of 0.89$`\pm `$0.05 Gyr are found with $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$=7480 K and $`\mathrm{log}g`$=4.06. So a mean density of $`\overline{\rho }`$=0.34$`\pm `$0.14 $`\rho `$ was derived. In addition, an asteroseismic mass of 1.63 M can be derived by using the equation of Arentoft et al. (1998) with $`M_{\mathrm{bol}}`$=2.46 mag.

The results have been checked against two other calibrations using $`uvby\beta `$ photometry: firstly, the biparametric calibrations for stellar mass, radius and surface gravity by Ribas et al. (1997) and, secondly, the absolute magnitude calibration by Domingo & Figueras (1999). A good agreement with the above was reached. In addition, our previously calculated values of $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$, $`\mathrm{log}g`$ and M are also supported by the grids of Smalley & Kupka (1997) with \[Me/H\]=0.0 and by Balona’s (1994) calibrations. Table 6 summarizes the parameters obtained for UV Tri.

### 4.2 Possible mode identification

Here we try to identify the modes for the two detected frequencies in terms of their pulsation constants and frequency ratio. We also compare them with existing models.

The physical parameters derived above are used to compute the observed pulsation constants $`Q_i`$ related to each frequency by means of the empirical formula of Petersen & J$`ø`$rgensen pete72 (1972). We obtained $`Q_1`$=0.053 and $`Q_2`$=0.046 d for $`f_1`$ and $`f_2`$. The $`Q`$ values derived from $`uvby`$ photometry have an uncertainty of $``$18 per cent ($``$0.01 d in our case) according to Breger et al. (1999). Taking this and the models of Fitch (1981) into account, $`f_1`$ and $`f_2`$ can be identified as $`g_1`$ modes with $`l`$=2 and 3, respectively. That is, UV Tri pulsates in low-degree ($`l`$) nonradial gravity ($`g`$) modes of low-order (radial overtone 1). This result is quite interesting because $`\gamma `$ Dor-type stars pulsate in low-degree nonradial gravity modes of high-order and UV Tri locates in the overlapped region of $`\delta `$ Sct and $`\gamma `$ Dor variables (Handler 1999; Guzik et al. 2000). The mode identifications based upon $`Q`$ values rely on the available models, of which the Fitch’s modes are widely used and are effective. On the other hand, the results using $`Q`$ solely might be dramatic (Garrido 2000).

In addition, we can also refer the variable to other existing models. The observed frequency ratio $`f_1/f_2`$=0.86 first rules out at least the existence of two radial modes. According to the empirical period-luminosity-colour relations of Stellingwerf stel79 (1979) and López de Coca et al. lope90 (1990) and adopting $`M_{\mathrm{bol}}`$=2.46 mag and $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$=7480 K, both $`f_1`$ and $`f_2`$ cannot be referred to a radial mode. Referred to the theoretical frequencies as well as frequency ratios of the radial oscillation modes of the 2.2 M model with solar metallicity (Z=0.02) of Viskum et al. visk98 (1998), our derived mean density $`\overline{\rho }`$=0.34$`\pm `$0.14 $`\rho _{\mathrm{}}`$ does not suggest a radial mode at the values of either $`f_1`$ or $`f_2`$. Furthermore, both frequencies are neither present in the 2.0 M (Z=0.02) model with $`l`$=0–2 of Templeton et al. temp97 (1997) nor in the models of Breger et al. (1999) for the well-studied $`\delta `$ Sct star FG Virginis. It is clear that the degree $`l`$ for the two modes is at least nonzero.

Consequently, the oscillation nature of both $`f_1`$ and $`f_2`$ is most likely to be purely nonradial. Unfortunately, current $`uvby`$ data are too few to perform an observational mode identification for the variable. Confirmation for the nonradial nature is needed.

### 4.3 A pulsation model

Here we try to construct an asteroseismic model for UV Tri. This model tends to identify the star’s evolutionary phase and pulsation modes. According to the evolutionary status of UV Tri and referring to the asteroseismic mass calculated above, we computed the theoretical pulsation frequencies following the minimal asteroseismological approach (Liu et al. 1999; Breger 2000). A pulsation model, corresponding to the evolutionary stage of $`\mathrm{log}L/L_{\mathrm{}}`$ = 1.00 and $`\mathrm{log}T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ = 3.871 ($`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$=7430 K) of 1.65 M, was computed using the program developed by Li & Stix (1994). Finally, the computed frequencies were compared to the observed ones and we are led to the results: two theoretical frequencies at 108.25 and 122.22 $`\mu `$Hz (i.e. 9.353 and 10.560 d-1), corresponding to $`l`$=2 and $`l`$=3 nonradial mode respectively, roughly match the two observed frequencies (107.98 and 125.18 $`\mu `$Hz). The theoretical pulsation constants for these two model frequencies are 0.050 and 0.045 d, perfectly agreeing with the observed ones. This model suggests following physical parameters: R=1.95 R, age=0.90 Gyr, $`\mathrm{log}T_\mathrm{c}`$=7.32 (central temperature), $`\mathrm{log}P_\mathrm{c}`$=17.24 (central pressure) and $`\mathrm{log}D_\mathrm{c}`$=1.92 (central density). The radius and age conform to those derived for UV Tri in the preceding section. Figure 3 shows the computed frequencies compared with the observed ones. We note that the suspected term $`f_3`$ has a counterpart (at $``$16.7 d-1 with $`l`$=3) in the model frequencies.

## 5 Discussion and conclusions

We present the data of mainly Johnson $`V`$ and Strömgren uvby$`\beta `$ for the $`\delta `$ Sct-type variable UV Tri collected at the Beijing Astronomical Observatory (China) and the Observatorio de Sierra Nevada (Spain). The data were carefully analysed for multiperiodicity and used to derive stellar physical parameters. The two frequencies $`f_1`$=9.3298 d-1 and $`f_2`$=10.8513 d-1 were detected over a commonly acceptable confidence level, confirming the previous detection. Besides the two dominating frequencies, some other frequencies higher than 8 d-1 as well as noise peaks in 0–7 d-1 domain are visible. Lower-frequency peaks might be caused by incomplete extinction correction between variable and comparison stars and from instrumental shifts. We have no information on the comparison stars’ colours and spectral types. Colour extinction because of different spectral types between the variable and comparison may also be a cause. Another possible reason causing the red noise might be the presence of small amplitude variations of the two frequencies $`f_1`$ and $`f_2`$. Therefore, we gave up period-searching in the lower-frequency region and only considered higher frequencies.

However, the observed light curves could not be well reproduced by the synthetic curves with the two frequencies. There are deviations on some nights. Some data points are undulatory. These mean that additional pulsation frequencies might present in the light curves of the variable. The frequency $`f_3`$=16.6863 d-1 is suspected to be intrinsic and is also predicted by the theoretic pulsation model, but confirmation is required because its amplitude is below the confidence level of current detection.

On the other hand, we noted that the poor fit may be resulted from instrumental, atmospheric and other unknown effects. We pointed out the phenomenon of anomalous cycles observed in the light curves of UV Tri similar to that reported for 57 Tau by Paparó et al. (2000) and further scrutinized by Handler (2001). We explored the data for possible reasons. The fact is clear that the two frequencies do not fit these special shapes. The anomalous cycles seemed not to be caused by non-photometric conditions, unstable instruments or the comparison star’s variability. As argued by Handler (2001), intrinsic multiperiodicity or atmospheric/instrumental effects could not explain such a phenomenon. They seem intrinsic but non-periodic. In order to examine the phenomenon and derive any regularity, further observations, especially coordinated multisite observations would be helpful. The use of different instruments will be a good tool for excluding the possibility of an instrumental cause.

We further searched the three-year data for possible frequency and amplitude variability. The pulsation frequencies were constant within the error bars (see Table 4). Table 5 shows the amplitudes in the three years. We think the presence of anomalous cycles had little effect on the amplitudes in 2000 and 2001, while no anomalous cycles were observed in 1999. Within the error ranges, the amplitudes of $`f_1`$ were constant in 1999–2001. Concerning the shorter data set in 1999, the corresponding amplitudes might be suffered from higher but underestimated errors. However, the amplitude of $`f_2`$ seemed to increase from 1999 to 2000.

Based on the photometric indices, we derived the physical parameters for UV Tri. UV Tri is a normal Pop. I $`\delta `$ Sct star with solar abundances evolving on its MS stage before the turn-off point (age=0.89$`\pm `$0.05 Gyr). The derived photometric properties and stellar parameters are given in Table 6. From these parameters, we calculated the pulsation constants for the two modes. We compared UV Tri to the models calculated for several well-studied $`\delta `$ Sct stars available in the literature, such as FG Vir, XX Pyx and others, and to the models for radial fundamental and overtone oscillations. All the existing models consistently identify both modes to be nonradial. No trace of a radial mode was found in these models for the observed frequencies of the variable. An attempt of theoretic pulsation modelling made by us refer $`f_1`$ and $`f_2`$ to be two nonradial modes with $`l`$=2 and 3, respectively. The most interesting result is the identification from the models of Fitch (1981), which advises both frequencies to be $`g_1`$ modes. According to the star’s location in the colour-magnitude diagram (see fig. 8 of Rodríguez & Breger 2001 or fig. 1 of Handler 1999), UV Tri is located in the overlapped portion of the instability regions of $`\delta `$ Sct and $`\gamma `$ Dor variables. We recall the spectral type A3, used currently for UV Tri, is in fact for its nearby star V Tri (Shaw et al. (1983). Liu et al. (2001) inferred A8 or F0 in terms of a relation of effective temperature, spectral type and absolute magnitude. According to the Morgan-Keenan (MK) types in the \[$`m_1`$\]-\[$`c_1`$\] diagram of Strömgren (1966) or the effective temperature-spectral type scales of Fitzpatrick & Garmany (1990), we can refer UV Tri to a type of A8V or F0V. The spectral type helps us further position the star in the colour-magnitude diagram. The possible presence of low-degree gravity mode pulsation tends to suggest UV Tri to be a $`\delta `$ Sct star pulsating in nonradial modes similar to $`\gamma `$ Dor variables. The possible connection between the $`\delta `$ Sct and $`\gamma `$ Dor variables has been discussed by Breger & Beichbuchner (1996). These kind of stars would greatly increase the possibility for asteroseismology of both classes of variable star. Furthermore, a $`\gamma `$ Dor star may pulsate in $`\delta `$ Sct-like $`p`$-modes. A few other stars with surface abundance peculiarities ($`\lambda `$ Boötis-type and Am stars) also have been observed that exhibit $`\gamma `$ Dor pulsations. These stars with $`g`$-mode pulsations offer interesting observational tests for current $`\gamma `$ Dor pulsation-driving mechanisms (Guzik et al. 2000).

## Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the anonymous referee for his constructive comments and many small changes made to the English in this paper, which helped to improve the manuscript. This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Eloy Rodríguez acknowledges partial research support from the Junta de Andalucía and the Direccion General de Investigacion (DGI) under project AYA2000-1559.


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# Galaxy groups in the 2dF redshift survey: Galaxy Spectral Type Segregation in Groups

## 1 Introduction

There is a strong evidence that high density environments can significantly affect many galaxy properties. This evidence is both theoretical (e.g. Gunn & Gott 1972, Torman 1998) and observational (e.g. Zabludoff & Franx 1993, Henriksen & Jones 1996). In particular star formation rates (Dressler et al. 1985, Balogh et al. 1998, Allam et al. 1999, Hashimoto et al 1999, Moss & Whittle 2000, Carter et al. 2001), gas content (Giovanelli & Haynes 1985, Vollmer et al. 2001, Solanes et al. 2001) and morphology change. Dressler (1980) find a clear correlation between galaxy morphology with the projected local galaxy density (hereafter $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$) defined with the ten nearest galaxies on the sky. Dressler et al. (1997) also found that, for distant clusters the fraction of S0 galaxies is 2-3 times smaller than in lower redshift clusters suggesting that S0’s are generated in large numbers only after cluster virialization. Whitmore et al. (1993) reexamine Dressler’s sample of galaxies in clusters and suggest that the morphology-cluster centric distance relation is more fundamental than the morphology-local galaxy density relation. Whitmore & Gilmore (1991) found that the fraction of ellipticals is roughly $`15\%`$ at the edge of a cluster all the way to about $`0.5`$ Mpc from the center, at which point it begins to rise dramatically, reaching values of $`6070\%`$ at the very center.

Various physical process have been proposed to explain these and other systematic differences between the field and cluster galaxy populations. Among them we can mention gas evaporation (Cowie & Songaila 1977), ram pressure stripping (Gunn and Gott 1972, Abadi et al. 1999, Quilis et al. 2000), truncated star formation (Larson et al. 1980, Balogh, Navarro & Morris 2000), galaxy harassment (Moore et al. 1996), merging (Barnes 1992, Lavery & Henry 1998, Steinmetz & Navarro 2002), tidal striping and shaking (Bird & Valtonen 1990, Miller 1988), etc. Although the above processes are all plausible, the effects provided by initial conditions on galaxy formation could also be a very important part in the segregation scenario within current hierarchical models of structure formation as the Cold Dark Matter model.

Recently, Domínguez, Muriel & Lambas (2001) analysed the relative fraction of morphological galaxy types in clusters as a function of the projected local galaxy density, and different cluster global parameters: projected gas density, projected total mass density and reduced clustercentric distance. The authors conclude that there are different mechanisms controlling the morphological segregation depending on the galaxy environment. They found that mechanisms of global nature dominate in high density environments, namely the virialized regions of clusters, while local galaxy density is the relevant parameter in the outskirts where the influence of cluster as a whole is relatively small compared to local effects.

In the field, galaxies form stars at rates several times higher than systems of similar luminosities at the cores of clusters. This is partly a result of the well-known morphology-density relation, since ellipticals and S0 galaxies are more abundant in clusters (Dressler 1980), but there is evidence that even later type galaxies in clusters and groups form stars at lower rates than in the field (Zabludoff & Mulchaey 1998, Balogh et al. 1999, Allam et al. 1999) suggesting that the cluster environment somehow curbs the star formation rates of all galaxies, regardless of morphology.

Postman & Geller (1984) gave evidence for the existence of a morphology-density relation in loose groups obtained from the CfA Redshift Survey. The authors found an absence of morphology-density relation at very low densities. However high density groups show a small change in the morphological fractions for the densest bins. Whitmore (1995) suggests that a possible problem with their study was the inclusion of clusters of galaxies in their sample. Many of the galaxies in the densest groups are cluster members. By removing these cluster galaxies the author reexamined the morphology-density relation finding that it is very weak or non existent in groups. Hashimoto et al (1999) using a very large and homogeneous dataset from the Las Campanas Redshift Survey showed that the star formation rates of galaxies are sensitive to the local galaxy density, in such way that galaxies show higher levels of star formation in low density than in high density environments.

Most of the galaxies in the universe belong to groups of galaxies, but, due to the difficulty of discerning them from the field, groups of galaxies are, as a whole, not as well studied as larger systems. These favorable environments for galaxy interactions, where the influence of the intergalactic medium and the tidal influences of the global potential are weaker, provide useful insights to understand the effects of the medium on morphology and star formation. A useful parameter that contains information on both morphology and current star formation in galaxies is that defined in Madwick et al (2002) where low values of this parameter, $`\eta <1.4`$, correspond mainly to early-types dominated by an old stellar population while positive large values of $`\eta `$ correlate with late morphological types and increasing star formation rates.

Merchán & Zandivarez (2002) have identified galaxy groups in the 2dF public 100K data release using a modified Huchra & Geller (1982) group finding algorithm taking into account the 2dF magnitude limit and redshift completeness masks. The global effects of group environment on star formation was analysed by Martínez et al (2002) using this catalogue. They have found a strong correlation between the relative fraction of different galaxy types and the parent group virial mass. For groups with $`M>10^{13}M_{}`$ the relative fraction of star forming galaxies is significantly suppressed indicating that the low mass group environment is affecting star formation.

In this paper, we present hints toward understanding local environment effects affecting the spectral types of galaxies in groups, taking advantage of a very large and homogeneous available dataset. In analogy with the dependence of morphology on environment we introduce the spectral type-density relation and spectral type fraction as a function of the group center distance for a subsample of galaxies in groups taken from the catalogue of Merchán & Zandivarez (2002). The outline of this paper is as follows. Section 2 describes the selection of the samples, whereas in section 3 the correlation between the fraction of galaxies of different star forming characteristics with local galaxy density and group center distance are analysed. Finally, a summary is presented in section 4.

## 2 Sample selection

Samples of galaxies and groups used in this work were selected from the Merchán & Zandivarez (2002) group catalogue (hereafter 2dFGGC). This catalogue was constructed from the 2dF public 100K data release of galaxies with the best redshift estimates within the northern (NGP, $`37^{}.5\delta 22^{}.5`$, $`21^h40^m\alpha 3^h30^m`$) and southern ($`7^{}.5\delta 2^{}.5`$; $`9^h50^m\alpha 14^h50^m`$) strips of the catalogue. The finder algorithm used for group identification is similar to that developed by Huchra & Geller (1982) but modified taking into account redshift completeness and magnitude limit mask present on the current release of galaxies (see Figure 13 and 15 of Colless et al. 2001). In the construction of the 2dFGGC values of $`\delta \rho /\rho =80`$ and $`V_0=200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ were used to maximize the group accuracy. These optimal parameteres are the result of several tests using mock catalogues that take into account the current radial and angular selection functions of the 2dFGRS. The linking parameters were scaled to a fiducial redshift $`cz=1000\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$. The resulting group catalogue comprises a total number of 2209 galaxy groups with at least 4 members and mean radial velocities in the range $`900\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1\mathrm{V}75000\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$. Virial group masses were estimated using the virial radius and the velocity dispersion ($`M_{vir}=\sigma ^2R_V/G`$, Limber & Mathews 1960) where the former is computed with the projected virial radius and the later with their radial counterpart. In Table 1 we show the comparison between the mean properties of the 2dFGGC with the most recent results for groups in Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS, Tucker et al 2000) and the combination of the groups in the Updated Zwicky Catalogue and Southern Sky Redshift Survey 2 (UZC+SSRS2, Ramella et al 2002)

Our sample of galaxies in groups is similar to the first sample used in Martínez et al. (2002), selected in order to achieve the highest level of completeness. The groups are limited to the redshift range $`0.02z0.056`$ due to the highly homogeneous distribution of group virial masses with redshift. Therefore, we minimize the possibility of a preferential bias to high mass groups in the sample. To prevent a sample biased to high luminosity galaxies, we also introduce an absolute magnitude cut-off on the galaxies ($`M_{b_J}<17.2`$) defined by the volume sampled. Thus any preferred galaxy type is avoided.

Madgwick et al (2002) have shown that for emission line galaxies, the equivalent width of $`H_\alpha `$ emission-line, $`EW(H_\alpha )`$, is very tightly correlated to the $`\eta `$ parameter defined in that work. The $`\eta `$ parametrization of a galaxy spectral properties is based upon a Principal Component Analysis of the galaxy spectra that takes into account the relative emission/absorption line strength present in a galaxy’s optical spectrum. This classification correlates well with morphology and can be interpreted as a measure of the relative current star-formation present in each galaxy.

Since we are interested in the study of the properties of galaxies on systems of galaxies, we consider the 4 types of Madgwick et al (2002):

* Type 1: $`\eta <1.4`$,
* Type 2: $`1.4\eta <1.1`$,
* Type 3: $`1.1\eta <3.5`$,
* Type 4: $`\eta 3.5`$.

The Type 1 class is characterized with an old stellar population and strong absorption features, the Types 2 and 3 comprise spiral galaxies with increasing star formation, finally the Type 4 class is dominated by particularly active galaxies such as starbursts. With this distinction we are able to analyse the environmental dependence of galaxy spectral types in groups.

## 3 Galaxy segregation analysis in groups

In this section, the fraction of each galaxy type is studied as a function of local galaxy environment, namely, the projected local galaxy density and the normalized group-centric distance.

### 3.1 Projected local galaxy density

We follow the suggestion of Domínguez, Muriel & Lambas (2001) that at low density environments the local galaxy density is a primary parameter in determining galaxy morphology. Therefore, we analyse how different types correlate with projected local galaxy density. This density was computed in a way similar to that in Dressler(1980) but using the area defined by the circle that encloses the fifth nearest neighbor to each galaxy. It is worth emphasizing the fact that since each galaxy in 2dFGGC has redshift measurements so our statistical analysis is free of projection effects. We have restricted ourselves to those groups in our sample which have at least 8 members within the constraints described in the previous section in order to improve the reliability of the statistical analysis. The stability of $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$ was tested changing the number of neighbors used in its computation. We have found no significant discrepancies in $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$ using the fifth, sixth and seventh nearest neighbor. The choice of the fifth member is due to the possibility of defining a more reliable estimation of local density for the poorest groups that dominate in number. Another test which gives additional support to our choice of the fifth member was performed in groups with more than 15 members computing $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$ with the fifth and the tenth nearest neighbor as analysed by Dressler (1980). As in the previous test, we find that both computations of $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$ are indistinguishable within the uncertainties.

We split the sample into two subsamples of low ($`M_V<10^{13.5}M_{}`$) and high ($`M_V10^{13.5}M_{}`$) virial mass. There are 18 and 32 groups in each subsample with a total of 161 and 417 galaxies respectively. In Figures 1 and 2 are shown the relative fraction of each galaxy type as a function of $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$ for low and high mass groups respectively. Error bars in the figures were estimated using the bootstrap resampling technique. Horizontal lines in the figures are the mean fraction of galaxies for different types within the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey within the same sampled volume and luminosity cut-off.

By comparison of Figures 1 and 2 it can be appreciated that there is an important difference between the two group subsamples. For the low-mass subsample there is no significant trend with $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$. On the other hand, the high-mass subsample exhibits a large increase in the fraction of non star forming galaxies (Type 1) with increasing $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$. These behaviours can be better appreciated in the upper left panels in the Figures that correspond to the fractions of Types 1 (dotted line), and combined Types 2 and 3 (continuous line). Type 4 galaxies, which correspond to the tail of the $`\eta `$ distribution were omitted since they include particularly active galaxies and AGNs. These results are consistent with Whitmore (1995) and Maia & da Costa (1990) who also find a lack of a trend of morphology-density relation in groups when excluding clusters.

We have also studied a sample consisting of groups which correspond to clusters identified in previous surveys. By cross-correlating group positions with clusters in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), we have found 20 groups in this subsample of the 2dFGGC with a cluster identification in NED (see Table 2). When the same analysis is applied to this sample of groups (Figure 3) we find a great similarity in the results to those found in the high mass group subsample shown in Figure 2. This is a totally consistent result since this sample is expected to correspond to the most massive groups.

### 3.2 Group-centric radius

Another way to analyse the dependence of galaxy types within the group environments is through galaxy group-centric distances normalized to the group virial radius. In the analysis of Whitmore, Gilmore & Jones (1993) and Whitmore (1995) the cluster-centric radial distance is found to be a primary driver in contrast to the local galaxy density, a secondary parameter in the morphology segregation. In this subsection we perform a similar analysis to that in subsection 3.1 using the group-centric distance instead of $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$. Since the computation of group-centric distances is less sensitive to the number of galaxies than $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$ we construct our sample with all groups with at least 6 members. This choice allow us to improve the statistics.

We also split the sample into two subsamples of low ($`M_V<10^{13.5}M_{}`$) and high ($`M_V10^{13.5}M_{}`$) virial mass as in subsection 3.1. There are 41 and 42 groups in each subsample with a total of 308 and 494 galaxies, respectively.

In Figure 4 and 5 are shown the relative fraction of each galaxy type as a function of the group-centric distance for low and high mass groups respectively. Horizontal lines in the figures are the mean fraction of galaxies for the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey as in Figures 1 and 2.

By comparison of Figures 4 and 5 it can be appreciated that there is a difference between the two group subsamples. For the low-mass subsample there is no significant trend with $`R/R_{vir}`$. On the other hand, the high-mass subsample exhibits a continuous decrease of the fraction of non star forming galaxies (Type 1) with increasing $`R/R_{vir}`$. These results are consistent with the results of Figures 1 and 2. A possible explanation can be found in Balogh & Navarro (2000) where it is found that star formation declines gradually after galaxies enter in the system, as a result of the removal of the gaseous envelopes that supply the fuel needed for star formation. This could explain the strong correlation found by Martínez et al (2002).

An important analysis could be performed if X-ray information were available for an important sample of the groups. Effects associated with the intragroup medium might be responsible of the removal of the gas supply of the galaxies, in such X-ray group sample could provide stronger gradient on galaxy fractions. The similarity of the gradients between the high mass subsample and the previously identified clusters (showed in Figure 6) indicate the importance of a separate analysis for group and cluster environments.

## 4 CONCLUSIONS

We have performed a correlation analysis between the relative fraction of spectral types and the projected local galaxy density, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$, in a sample of groups taken from the 2dFGGC constructed by Merchán & Zandivarez (2002). Several possible sources of biases have been considered: Firstly a reliable sample of groups has been selected with a redshift independent virial mass distribution and a volume complete selection of their galaxy members. Secondly, to test the stability of the results on $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$ estimates, we have computed $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$ with different number of galaxy neighbours finding that using the five nearest members gives accurate results. It should be remarked that our analysis was made on spectral types of group member galaxies, so that this study in contrast to many previous works lacks projection effects. We find a clear distinction between high virial mass groups ($`M_V>10^{13.5}M_{}`$) and the less massive ones. While the massive groups show a significant dependence of the relative fraction of low star formation galaxies on $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{gal}`$, groups with lower masses show no significant trends.

In a similar fashion, we have analysed the spectral type fractions as a function of group-centric distance. There is a significant difference between the behaviours of the two subsamples. While for the low-mass subsample there is no significant trend with $`R/R_{vir}`$, the high-mass subsample shows a continuous decrease of the fraction of non star forming galaxies (Type 1) with increasing $`R/R_{vir}`$.

In support of our analysis, we have considered a subsample of our groups that were previously identified as clusters. It is worth noticing that these objects are poor clusters since they do not have strong X-ray emission. We find that this subsample is mainly composed of the tail of high group masses and shows a very similar behaviour to our high virial mass samples.

## Acknowledgments

The authors thank the referee Douglas Tucker for helpful comments. We thank the 2dFGRS for having made available the actual data sets. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We thank E. Fitzgerald for suggestions. This work has been partially supported by Consejo de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas de la República Argentina (CONICET), the Secretaría de Ciencia y Técnica de la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (SeCyT) and Fundación Antorchas, Argentina.


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# X-ray temporal properties of XTE J1650-500 during outburst decay

## 1 Introduction

Galactic black hole candidates (BHC) exhibit transitions between X-ray states distinguished by their different spectral and timing properties (Tanaka & Lewin, 1995). The classification of these states is not rigorously defined and is an active topic of debate. The accretion rate seems to be the most important parameter determining the spectral states, although it is argued by Homan et al. (2001) that two independent parameters are needed to describe the states, and the second parameter could possibly be the size of the Comptonizing region. Five states have been frequently quoted: the off state, the low-hard state (LS), the intermediate state (IS), the high-soft state (HS) and the very-high state (VHS). They are named after their spectral and luminosity properties, but also show very distinct temporal and radio properties. The HS is dominated by a soft spectrum with little or no timing noise (rms amplitude less than a few %), and the radio emission is quenched (Fender et al., 1999; Corbel et al., 2000). On the other hand, the LS is dominated by a power law component in the X-ray spectrum, which is often interpreted as being associated with a hot electron corona, and shows very strong band limited noise (up to 50% rms amplitude) and quasi-periodic-oscillations (QPO). Moreover, the radio observations often reveal a compact jet during this state (Corbel et al., 2001; Fender et al., 2001, and references therein). The IS/VHS shows both an ultra-soft spectral component and a power-law tail with 1% – 15% rms variability. Some of the BHCs show high frequency QPOs (with frequencies of several hundreds of Hz) in this state. The compact jet is also quenched in the IS/VHS, i.e. in any state where a soft, strong X-ray component exists (Corbel et al., 2001).

The geometry of the accretion system in each state and the triggering mechanism for the state transitions are not well understood (Nowak, Wilms & Dove, 2002). The most notable observational properties during the transition to the LS are (1) the appearance of QPOs and strong band limited noise in the power density spectrum (PSD) and the hardening of the power law component in the X-ray spectrum, possibly indicating the formation of a hot corona, (2) the evolution of the characteristic frequencies of the power spectrum which might indicate retreating of the inner-disk radius (di Matteo & Psaltis, 1999; Tomsick & Kaaret, 2000; Kalemci et al., 2001), (3) optically thin synchrotron radio emission indicating plasma ejections and formation of compact radio jets (Corbel et al., 2000), and (4) a decrease in coherence and an increase in time lags observed in Cyg X-1 which might be related to the radio jets (Pottschmidt et al., 2000).

Here, we describe a state transition found in the soft X-ray transient XTE J1650$``$500 in light of the observations above. XTE J1650$``$500 was first detected by the All-Sky Monitor (ASM; Levine et al., 1996) on board the *Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE)* in 2001 September (Remillard, 2001). The optical and radio counterparts were identified by Castro-Tirado et al. (2001) and Groot et al. (2001), respectively. Augusteijn, Coe & Groot (2001) suggest a long orbital period and a low-mass secondary. Pointed X-ray observations by *RXTE* show strong low frequency QPOs and band limited timing noise (Wijnands, Miller & Lewin, 2001), while *Chandra* revealed ionized iron absorption lines (Miller et al., 2002b). The X-ray flux started to decay 45 days after the beginning of the outburst, and a transition to the hard state occurred. During the hard state, additional radio measurements were made and an inverted spectrum indicative of a compact jet was observed (S. Corbel, private communication). Around 10 days after the state transition, the source was unobservable due to the Sun. After the Sun gap, the X-ray flux showed a modulation with a $``$14 day period (Tomsick et al., 2002b). The mass function has yet to be measured, however both the X-ray spectra, and the temporal properties are similar to the known Galactic black hole candidates (BHC). Moreover, a recent *XMM-Newton* analysis of the broad iron line feature suggests that XTE J1650$``$500 is a rapidly rotating black hole (Miller et al., 2002a).

In this paper, we search for high frequency QPOs and study the evolution of the low frequency QPOs through the decay. We investigate the evolution of the continuum parameters of the power spectra during the transition, and compare the temporal properties to the previous observations and other BHCs. We also employ other temporal analysis tools related to the cross spectrum, namely the frequency dependent time lags and coherence function.

## 2 Observations and Analysis

We analyzed the PCA/*RXTE* (Proportional Counter Array, see Bradt, Rothschild & Swank (1993) for a description of *RXTE*) data from observations of XTE J1650$``$500 from the start of the decay ($``$MJD111Modified Julian Date (MJD = JD - 2400000.5) 52218) until the source was close to the sun between MJD 52240 – 52266 (see Fig. 1). When it was observable again, the flux had decayed significantly. Until MJD 52230 the X-ray energy spectrum was typical of a HS black hole spectrum. Between MJD 52230 and 52232 (around the dashed line in Fig. 1) the energy spectrum hardened.222The detailed spectral analysis of XTE J1650$``$500 during the outburst decay from the *RXTE* and the *Chandra* observations will be presented in a separate paper by Tomsick et al. (2002a). For the observation at MJD 52232, both the energy spectrum and the power spectrum showed significant changes and a transition to the hard state occurred. (The first square after the dashed line in Fig. 1.) We call this observation Obs 1, and number the following observations according to their date of observation. Before the transition, the variability was very weak and the power spectrum was not above the noise level. We obtained a PSD by combining light curves from our 10 observations in the HS and fitted it with a Lorentzian, which resulted in a 95% confidence rms amplitude upper limit of 4%. The rms amplitude jumped to 17% for Obs 1, and a weak QPO at 8.71 Hz is observed for Obs 2. For the following observations until the sun gap, both the energy spectrum and the power spectrum showed characteristics of a typical hard state (see Fig. 2). In this paper, we focus on the 7 observations after the state transition and before the sun gap, represented by the squares in Fig. 1. Due to the drastic change in the flux and the low quality of the temporal data, the observations after the sun gap are not included in this work.

We used the standard *RXTE* data analysis software FTOOLS 5.1 to extract light curves. For all observations, the data were accumulated in an event mode with $`125\mu \mathrm{s}`$ time resolution and 64 energy channels. Typical integration times were 1 – 2 ks per observation. We used all of the Proportional Counter Units (PCU) that were on simultaneously for the timing analysis. The observations were made after the loss of the propane layer for PCU 0, and we dealt with the additional background as described in Kalemci et al. (2001). For each observation, we computed the power spectra and cross spectra using IDL programs developed at the University of Tübingen (Pottschmidt, 2002) for three energy bands, 2 – 6 keV, 6 – 15 keV, and 15 – 30 keV and combined band of 2 – 30 keV. Above 30 keV, the source is not significantly above the background. The PSD was normalized as described in Miyamoto & Kitamoto (1989) and corrected for the dead time effects according to Zhang et al. (1995) with a dead-time of $`10\mu \mathrm{s}`$ per event. First, we searched for high frequency QPOs using short 1 second segments with a Nyquist frequency of 2048 Hz using the summed energy band of 2–30 keV. We did not detect any high frequency QPO in any of our observations. The 95% confidence upper limits on the rms amplitude for QPOs above 50 Hz with a fixed quality value of $`Q=6`$ are between 3.7 – 4.4 % for different observations. Next, using 128 second time segments, we investigated the low frequency QPOs and the timing properties of the continuum up to 256 Hz. We also analyzed the time lags and coherence function between 2 – 6 keV and 6 – 15 keV energy band light curves.

## 3 Results

Historically, the PSD of BHCs during the low state has been modeled by a broken power law (or power laws with more than one break) plus narrow Lorentzians to fit the QPOs (Nowak et al., 1999; Tomsick & Kaaret, 2000). This model is a good representation of our PSDs also. However, recent papers successfully fit several BHC and neutron star PSDs with broad Lorentzians for the continuum and narrow Lorentzians for the QPOs (van Straaten et al., 2001; Pottschmidt et al., 2002; Belloni, Psaltis & van der Klis, 2002). When we fit our data with broad and narrow Lorentzians we see that this modeling represents the PSDs as well as or better than the broken power law in terms of $`\chi ^2`$ statistics. Although we did both kinds of fitting, we only present the Lorentzian fits. This allows for an easier comparison to recent work, for example on Cyg X-1 by Pottschmidt et al. (2002).

### 3.1 Lorentzian fits

We fit all our PSDs with Lorentzians of the form

$$L_i(f)=\frac{R_i^2\mathrm{\Delta }_i}{2\pi [(ff_i)^2+(\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{\Delta }_i)^2]}$$
(1)
where subscript $`i`$ denotes each Lorentzian component in the fit, $`R_i`$ is the rms amplitude of the Lorentzian, $`\mathrm{\Delta }_i`$ is the full-width-half-maximum, and $`f_i`$ is the resonance frequency. A useful quantity of the Lorentzian is the frequency at which its contribution to the total rms variability is maximum (hereafter peak frequency):

$$\nu _i=f_i\left(\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }_i^2}{4f_i^2}+1\right)^{1/2}$$
(2)
In Fig. 2, we plot the power spectra in the form of PSD $`\times `$ frequency and over-plot the Lorentzian fits. In this figure, the Lorentzians peak at $`\nu _i`$ not at $`f_i`$. In this section, including the tables, Lorentzian frequency means the peak frequency, not the resonance frequency. Most of our observations contain a Lorentzian that is narrow (with $`Q>2`$, as compared to $`Q<1`$ for broad Lorentzians) which we call a QPO. The QPO frequencies reported here are the resonance frequencies to make them easier to be compared to previous reports.

As seen in Fig. 2, except for the first observation, each observation requires at least two broad Lorentzians to fit the continuum, and a QPO (see Table 1 for the fit parameters). For Obs 1, the 95% confidence upper limit on the rms amplitude of a QPO in 0.1 - 20 Hz range with a $`Q=6`$ is 2.8 %. The QPO is always the second peaked component in the PSD. Although the second peaked component in Obs 4 has a quality value of $``$1.5, it is still quoted as a QPO for consistency. Since they are narrow, the quoted resonance frequencies are very close to the peak frequencies333The peak frequency and the resonance frequency differ by 5% for the worst case of Obs 4.. We call the broad Lorentzians in the fit $`L_i`$, where $`i`$=1 is the lowest frequency peak Lorentzian. The QPO is not counted and always referred as the QPO throughout the paper.

There is an overall shift to lower frequencies with time for both the wide Lorentzians and the QPOs (see Fig. 3a). The overall rms amplitude increases with time, and settles around 35% after Obs 5 as seen in Fig. 3b. The rms amplitudes of individual Lorentzian components do not show a regular trend and can be found in Table 1.

We also study the dependence of temporal properties on energy. We fit the PSDs from two energy band light curves, 2 – 6 keV and 6 – 15 keV, and study the evolution of the peak frequencies and the rms amplitudes of Lorentzian components. Fig. 4 summarizes our efforts, where we plot the peak frequencies and the rms amplitudes of $`L_1`$ in the two energy bands mentioned. For Obs 1, during the state transition, there is a clear shift with energy in the peak frequency of $`L_1`$, the only component in the PSD fit as seen in Fig. 5. The 6 – 15 keV $`L_1`$ peaks at $`3.50\pm 0.42`$ Hz, whereas the 2 – 6 keV $`L_1`$ peaks at $`9.70\pm 2.16`$ Hz. Moreover, the 6 – 15 keV rms amplitude is higher than the 2 – 6 keV amplitude. For the remaining observations, the 2 – 6 keV rms amplitude is higher, and the Lorentzians peak at the same frequency (within 1-$`\sigma `$ error).

It was shown recently that $`\nu _i`$ is an important parameter in terms of frequency correlations (Nowak, 2000; van Straaten et al., 2001; Pottschmidt et al., 2002). Having observed these correlations in other sources, we decided to look for them in XTE J1650$``$500, and plotted peak and QPO frequencies as a function of each other. Two sets of parameter correlations are apparent as shown in Fig. 6; $`\nu _2`$ and $`\nu _1`$ show a correlation similar to the one reported by Psaltis, Belloni & van der Klis (1999), and $`\nu _1`$ shows a correlation with the QPO frequency which is shown to exist for other black hole and neutron star sources (Wijnands & van der Klis, 1999). Due to low statistics and large errors, we could not conclude whether $`\nu _3`$ correlates with $`\nu _1`$.

### 3.2 Time lags and coherence

One can use the cross-spectral elements of the Fourier transform to obtain other information. The coherence function, for example, is a Fourier-frequency-dependent measure of the degree of linear correlation between two concurrent time series, in this case light curves measured simultaneously in two energy bands (Nowak et al., 1999). For example, unity coherence means that there exists a linear transformation function between two energy bands for each piece of light curve that we are averaging and this function is the same for every piece. The Fourier time lag is a Fourier-frequency-dependent measure of the time delay between two concurrent time series (Miyamoto & Kitamoto, 1989; Nowak et al., 1999). It is related to the phase of the average cross power spectrum between the “soft energy” light curve and the “hard energy” light curve. We use the convention that the sign of the lag is positive when hard photons lag soft photons. Observations of hard lags in BHCs have often been interpreted as evidence for Compton upscattering in a hot electron gas (Payne, 1980), however simple Comptonization models have difficulty explaining the magnitude of lags (Ford et al., 1999).

Fig. 7 shows the evolution of mean coherence and mean time lag in 1 – 10 Hz where they are least affected by the Poisson noise. The mean lag decreases whereas the coherence function increases with time, and they both approach an asymptotic value. The time lag decays from 24 ms to around 6 ms, and the coherence increases from 0.6 to unity. Note that during the HS, the average coherence is consistent with being zero, therefore time lags have no physical meaning (Nowak et al., 1999). This is the third source after Cyg X-1 and GX 339$``$4 to show enhanced lags during the state transition. We also added the evolution of the hardness ratio of the X-ray spectrum to Fig. 7. The ratio is taken between the HEXTE Cluster A count rate in 17 – 150 keV band and the PCA count rate per PCU in 3 – 10 keV band. The hardness ratio is inversely related to the power-law index ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$) of the X-ray spectrum, and preliminary spectral analysis confirms their anti-correlation. $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ and average lag have been shown to correlate for Cyg X-1 (Pottschmidt et al., 2002) and GX 339$``$4 (Nowak, Wilms & Dove, 2002). The anti-correlation of the hardness ratio and the mean lag shows that XTE J1650$``$500 is similar to these sources.

## 4 Discussion

### 4.1 Comparison of XTE J1650$``$500 with other sources

The temporal properties of XTE J1650$``$500 during the transition to the hard state are very similar to what has been observed for other BHCs, namely 4U 1630$``$47 (Tomsick & Kaaret, 2000), Cyg X-1 (Pottschmidt et al., 2002), and also XTE J1550$``$564 (Kalemci et al., 2001). For 4U 1630$``$47, a sharp transition was seen with most of the changes in the temporal properties occurring in less than 2 days during the decay of the 1998 outburst. Similarly, for XTE J1650$``$500, Obs 1 and our last HS observation are only one day apart. For 4U 1630$``$47 (during its 1998 decay) and for XTE J1550$``$564 (during its 2000 decay), the QPO frequency and the break frequency showed a decreasing trend, whereas the overall rms amplitude showed an increasing trend after the transition (Tomsick & Kaaret, 2000; Kalemci et al., 2001), as observed in XTE J1650$``$500. On the other hand, the 3 – 20 keV X-ray flux decreased during and after the transition for these sources, whereas it increased during the transition for XTE J1650$``$500. This is likely due to the hardening of the power law index and the energy range of PCA. This behavior can be explained if we adapt the two parameter description of Homan et al. (2001) and assume that the second parameter is the size of the Comptonizing region. Then, the mass accretion rate through the disk may decrease, but the increasing size of the Comptonizing region may result in many hard photons in the PCA range which can increase the X-ray flux. We also note that there could be significant flux below 3 keV, and bolometric fluxes might be considerably higher, especially for the HS.

Finally, it seems that the changes observed in XTE J1650$``$500 during the transition to the hard state resemble best to the transitional episodes of Cyg X-1. First of all, the mean X-ray time lag in 1 – 10 Hz frequency range is longer and the mean coherence is low during the state transition as compared to later observations, just as in Cyg X-1 (Cui et al., 1997; Pottschmidt et al., 2002). The peak frequencies of $`L_1`$ and $`L_2`$ are significantly higher and $`L_3`$ is absent during the state transition, again very similar to what has been observed in Cyg X-1. Correlations between the peak frequencies of the Lorentzians, which we will discuss in Section 4.3, are also similar.

### 4.2 Lags and Coherence

During the transition, the average time lags are enhanced compared to the following observations as shown in Fig. 7. As mentioned earlier, this behavior has been seen before for Cyg X-1 and for GX 339$``$4 (Pottschmidt et al., 2000; Nowak, Wilms & Dove, 2002). In Cyg X-1, the mean lags do not change during the LS and the soft state444The soft state in Cyg X-1 is probably not the usual soft state as seen in other BHCs, but rather closer to the “very high state”, and therefore direct comparisons with the HS of XTE J1650$``$500 and soft state of Cyg X-1 might not be correct. and they have similar values, but they only increase during the failed state transitions. Pottschmidt et al. (2000) suggested that one possible reason is the optically thin radio outflows during the state transition which creates an additional Comptonizing area at its base that increases the time lags. It seems that the quenching of jets during the HS and the IS/VHS, optically thin outflows (and simultaneous building of a compact jet) during the state transitions, and optically thick emission during the LS are typical properties of BHCs (Corbel et al., 2000, 2001; Fender, 2001). For XTE J1650$``$500, there is no radio measurement during the state transition, but an inverted radio spectrum is observed during the hard state (S. Corbel, private communication), and it is likely that a large outflow occurred during the state transition as in other BHCs. Therefore, extended and hot material from optically thin ejections or from a compact jet building up could be the reason for the enhanced lags as hypothesized for Cyg X-1 and GX 339$``$4, and the reduced coherence could simply be a result of additional scatterings in the hot material. The spectral modeling of the corona and the reflection features also seem to support this idea for Cyg X-1 and GX 339$``$4 (Nowak, Wilms & Dove, 2002; Pottschmidt et al., 2002).

The reason for the lack of enhanced lags after Obs 2 could also be due to different Lorentzian components acting at the same frequency range. Nowak (2000) discussed the case that the overall measured time lag may be a composite of time lags inherent to each individual coherent PSD component. Although the individual time lags can be fairly large, the composite lag might be small. For Obs 1 the only apparent component present is $`L_1`$. Although we can not rule out the presence of a QPO, its rms upper limit amplitude is low compared to rms amplitude of $`L_1`$. For Obs 2, the 1 – 10 Hz band is dominated by $`L_1`$ (14% rms amplitude), where $`L_2`$ contributes little (2% rms amplitude). Moreover, the QPO, which is also within this frequency range, is weak. For the remaining observations, significant part of $`L_2`$ moves into this frequency range555For example, for Obs 5, the relative rms contributions of $`L_1`$ and $`L_2`$ in 1 – 10 Hz range are 11% and 15%, respectively. and QPOs are strong (see Fig. 2). This could be the reason for the reduced time lags after Obs 11. Note that similar arguments have been raised to explain the enhanced lags in Cyg X-1 (Pottschmidt et al., 2002). One way to check this argument is to compare the frequency dependent lags with the shape of the power spectrum. Unfortunately, the quality of our time lag spectrum is not good enough to do this. However, the anti-correlation of the mean coherence with the mean lag seems to counter this argument since one would expect a decrease in the mean coherence in a frequency band where different processes are contributing. A steady state is reached after our third observation, and the time lags (correspondingly the phase lags) are small. For these cases, the Lorentzians could be due to individual coherent processes. One can still obtain near unity coherence if the phase lags are small as illustrated in Nowak, Wilms & Dove (1999), see especially equation (3) of this paper. In Fig. 7, we also included the evolution of the hardness ratio, since it anti-correlates with the mean time lag. Note that it also anti-correlates with the peak frequencies as in the case of Cyg X-1 and GX 339$``$4. The implications of this relation have been discussed extensively for GX 339$``$4 by Nowak, Wilms & Dove (2002).

### 4.3 Correlations between fit parameters

Various papers address the correlations between certain fit parameters of the PSD for X-ray binaries and show that these correlations exist for decades of frequency range (Wijnands & van der Klis, 1999; Psaltis, Belloni & van der Klis, 1999; van Straaten et al., 2001; Belloni, Psaltis & van der Klis, 2002). One correlation is between the break frequency (nearly equivalent of $`\nu _1`$) and the frequency of a “bump” or QPO above this break for different types of X-ray binaries: black hole candidates, atoll sources, millisecond X-ray pulsar and Z sources (Wijnands & van der Klis, 1999). We obtained a box of frequency range from Fig. 2a of their paper which the correlation exists and over-plotted this to our QPO frequency versus $`\nu _1`$ plot666We also performed power-law fits and confirmed that the break frequency is close to $`\nu _1`$. When we plot the break frequency - QPO frequency correlation from these fits, we obtained slightly better agreement with the Wijnands correlation. in Fig. 6a. This plot shows that we can add XTE J1650$``$500 to the list of various other X-ray binaries for which this correlation holds.

There is another correlation reported by Psaltis, Belloni & van der Klis (1999) between the narrow QPO frequency and the frequency of a peaked Lorentzian component that occurs at frequencies higher than the QPOs. In our case this could be the QPO frequency vs $`\nu _2`$ or QPO frequency vs $`\nu _3`$. The former is not consistent with the correlation reported by Psaltis, Belloni & van der Klis (1999), and the latter is consistent within 1$`\sigma `$ error bars, however the error bars on $`\nu _3`$ are quiet large (see Table 1). The interesting result is that the correlation between $`\nu _1`$ and $`\nu _2`$ for XTE J1650$``$500 is consistent with the correlation reported by Psaltis, Belloni & van der Klis (1999) as shown in Fig. 6b. This is not very surprising since all these correlations have issues with the identification of the related components (Wijnands & van der Klis, 1999; Psaltis, Belloni & van der Klis, 1999; Belloni, Psaltis & van der Klis, 2002). The same correlation between $`\nu _1`$ and $`\nu _2`$ is seen for Cyg X-1 also, adding one more to the similarities list.

### 4.4 Energy dependence of PSD components

Perhaps the most interesting result of this paper is the shifting of the peak frequency of $`L_1`$ to a higher frequency with increasing energy for Obs 1 as shown in Fig. 5. This kind of behavior has been seen with *Ginga* in two sources before, GX 339$``$4 and GS 1124$``$68 (Belloni et al., 1997). All those observations were in the VHS, except for one observation in GS 1124$``$68, where it was during the transition to the LS. This is the second time such a shift has been observed during a state transition. Belloni et al. (1997) interpreted the shifts as a result of shots with energy dependent amplitudes and profiles. We show in Fig. 4 that after Obs 1, there is no shift in the peak frequencies. This is hard to explain with the shot-noise models since it requires sudden removal of the energy dependence from the shot profile.

We attribute the frequency shift to a geometrical effect. We adapt the idea of the corona being the part of a large vertically stretched conical outflow which explains enhanced lags and reduced coherence as discussed in Pottschmidt et al. (2002). One can add a temperature profile to the vertical scale such that the base of the outflow has a higher temperature. Then, the seed photons from the inner disk will interact predominantly with the higher temperature part of the jet at its base and will be scattered to higher energies. Assuming that the higher frequency variability in the accretion disk is created close to the inner edge, the high energy power spectrum would peak at higher frequencies. Similarly, seed photons originating away from the inner edge, which creates the low frequency variability, would interact predominantly with the cooler, higher altitude parts of the outflow. When the large outflow is over, the corona shrinks in the vertical scale which would cause a decrease in the X-ray lags and an increase in the coherence. Moreover, the temperature variation could be either absent or greatly reduced compared to the large outflow case which would also explain the disappearance of the frequency shift as observed for XTE J1650$``$500.

As mentioned earlier, the shift in the peak frequencies as a function of energy has been observed during the VHS and transitions. The radio emission is quenched in the IS/VHS, but a corona probably exists. Although this corona is probably not related to the “base of the jet” or an “optically thin outflow” as suggested in our model to explain XTE J1650$``$500 during the transition, the overall geometry in the IS/VHS might be similar, perhaps on a smaller scale. A systematic search on the frequency shift effect during the VHS for XTE J1650$``$500, and other sources during the IS/VHS and during the transitions can increase the number of constraints on the geometry of the accretion flow.

## 5 Summary and Conclusions

The similarities of temporal properties to those of other known black hole systems suggest that XTE J1650$``$500 is also a black hole system. Especially the similarities to Cyg X-1 are remarkable. Here is a summary of the temporal properties:

* The state transition is sharp in terms of the temporal properties with the appearance of band limited noise in the PSD. The rms amplitude increases from 4% upper limit in HS to $``$16% during Obs 1. The last HS observation and Obs 1 are only one day apart.
* The PSD can be characterized by broad Lorentzians and QPOs. The characteristic frequencies of these components decrease after the transition to the LS occurs, which can be interpreted as retreating of the inner disk radius as discussed in di Matteo & Psaltis (1999) for other BHCs. The total rms amplitude also increases during this time.
* The peak frequencies obey the correlations reported by Wijnands & van der Klis (1999) and Psaltis, Belloni & van der Klis (1999).
* The average lags are higher during the first two observations than the remaining observations. Likewise, the hardness ratio shows an increasing behavior as the transition occurs. The coherence function anti-correlates with mean lag and increase during the transition, and becomes unity coherence for the last two observations.
* $`L_1`$ peaks at different frequencies for different energy bands during Obs 1. After this observation this shift disappears. Also, the rms amplitude of $`L_1`$ increases with energy only for the first observation whereas it decreases with energy for the remaining observations. The shift can be a sign of temperature gradient at the base of the jet as discussed in Section 4.4.

EK acknowledges useful discussions with Jörn Wilms, Mike Nowak and Craig Markwardt. The authors would like to thank all scientists contributed to the Tübingen Timing Tools. EK was partially supported by TÜBİTAK. JAT acknowledges partial support from NASA grant NAG5-10886. KP was supported by grant Sta 173/25-1 and Sta 173/25-3 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. RW was supported by NASA through Chandra Postdoctoral Fellowship grant number PF9-10010 awarded by CXC, which is operated by SAO for NASA under contract NAS8-39073. PK acknowledges partial support from NASA grant NAG5-7405.


text:
# References

GRAVITY SANS SINGULARITIES

K. H. Mariwalla***E-mail: mari@imsc.ernet.in

Institute of Mathematical Sciences
C.I.T. Campus, Tharamani, Chennai - 600113, INDIA

Summary

Basis and limitations of singularity theorems for Gravity are examined. As singularity is a critical situation in course of time, study of time paths, in full generality of Equivalence principle, provides two mechanisms to prevent singularity. Resolution of singular Time translation generators into space of its orbits, and essential higher dimensions for Relativistic particle interactions has facets to resolve any real singularity problem. Conceptually, these varied viewpoints have a common denominator: arbitrariness in the definition of ‘energy’ intrinsic to the space of operation in each case, so as to render absence of singularity a tautology for self-consistency of the systems.

1. Following powerful theorems in General Relativity (GR) gravitational singularities have acquired rare acceptability, unusual in physics. Singularity in a theoretical framework implies a critical situation in course of time. Relativity introduces complications of light cone (null paths, surfaces) and inseparability of Space from Time (causality, Hyperbolicity). Taking gravity as a central force, a null surface $`\stackrel{}{X}^2t^2`$ $`=`$ $`0`$ defines for a spatial section the metric $`ds^2`$ $`=`$ $`d\stackrel{}{X}^2dt^2`$ $`=`$ $`R^2d\mathrm{\Omega }_2^{2}`$; so, as a body contracts under gravity beyond $`r<R`$, a spherical 2-surface gets ‘trapped’. This forms basis of singularity theorems, beside sufficiency conditions for a minimum for proper time path functional $`𝑑\tau `$, throughout. For not too specialised (relative to curvature components) velocity field $`v`$, this is better studied with the (Hamilton-Jacobi analogue) Raychaudhuri equation: $`\tau `$-rate trace of $`v`$-Lie derivative of the metric ($`2\dot{\theta }`$) is quadratic in velocities with Ricci tensor coefficients (plus terms in $`(v)^2`$ and $`\dot{v}`$); via Einstein equation, one obtains for ‘positive energy condition’, inevitability of singularity . Despite, generality of this and related theorems, there are inherent limitations, as path or velocity field refers to an ideal test-particle: structureless, inviting no reaction, e.g., in a closed system in mechanics, centre of mass may be fixed, but angular position can vary ad libitum; spin plays a crucial role here, and is ignored. Also ignored are forces (like Coriolis-magnetic field) that do no work - the only nongravity relativistic forces, giving added dimension to ‘interaction space’, where interaction energy ‘resides’, just as gravitational energy resides in space-time. Resolution of incomplete and non-global Hamiltonians in mechanics are also relevant.

2. Einstein  envisaged geometric Gravity as a generalization of Special Relativity (SR), in that: by weak principle of equivalence a test particle follows a geodesic, and by strong principle the metric is a covariant constant; both allow torsion. In geometric terms, the first law in mechanics expresses vanishing of curvature and torsion; while a spherical rotator corresponds to vanishing curvature (not torsion) only; this yields  its symmetry group as $`SO(n+1)`$ and spin-torsion relation.

A geodesic equation admits a further symmetry $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\nu \sigma }^\mu `$ $``$ $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\nu \sigma }^\mu `$ $`+`$ $`\delta _\nu ^\mu \lambda _\sigma `$; its antisymmetric part contributes to torsion to define precise spin-torsion relation in Einstein-Cartan theory . The symmetric part redefines the path parameter. An integrable change $`\lambda _\sigma `$ $`=`$ $`_\sigma \lambda `$, gives Einstein’s  $`\lambda `$-transformation leaving curvature (with torsion) unchanged; Weyl’s projective curvature is also unchanged, implying a same system of paths. Projective Einstein-Cartan structure is the most general, consistent with Equivalence principle and Einstein equations. The energy tensor gives only the contribution of matter, which balances or complements the gravitational field, as expressed in space-time geometry. Due to internal changes - no external energy is supplied - two sides of Einstein equations may, in principle, undergo spontaneous change governed by spin-torsion relation in Einstein-Cartan theory, or by projective change relating two (symmetric) connections to provide for singularity avoidance:

* In a closed gravitating system a continual process of capture and expulsion is on, involving interconversion of orbital and spin angular momenta, and spin redistribution; it may be looked upon to generate torsion, leaving paths unchanged, but redefine Einstein and Energy tensors. In Raychaudhuri equation such a change is known  to provide for avoidance of singularity.
* A spontaneous projective change, alters the (covariant) Ricci tensor additively  and may be used in Raychaudhuri equation to avoid singularity. Elsewhere we have treated Robertson-Walker metric for imploding cold body for singularity avoidance  and for Hawking radiation . But the present argument is more general.

3. In mechanics for linear force the orbits are either only closed or open; the corresponding Schrödinger operators have respectively discrete or continuous spectra; here Hamiltonians generate finite canonical transformations and belong to $`sl(2;R)`$ Lie algebra. For the Kepler problem, Hamiltonian vector field is known to be incomplete and non-global. By a change in time parameter, it is resolvable into $`1`$-parameter subgroups of $`sl(2;R)`$, that have either discrete or continuous spectra. For Hamiltonians with more complicated spectra of uneven spread of point and continuous spectrum, one expects some representation of Virasoro algebra. For path-integral computations and uncertainty relations, only such globally Hamiltonian vector fields will do. Thus incompleteness does not necessarily imply a singularity, when it can be resolved. Direct application of this to GR singularities is perhaps problematic, as space and time are well entwined. But, there is a connection between approaches based on curves and $`1`$-parameter groups via discrete subgroups of conformal group, implicit in Poincare’s work on automorphic functions and bounded domains.

4. Relativistic Kinematics of particles describes all elastic/inelastic processes without a potential, as all interaction energy comes from the masses. For translation generators $`P_\mu `$, $`mv_\mu `$ $``$ $`P_\mu A_\mu `$ defines the displacement field $`A_\mu `$ as carrier of interaction energy modes, corresponding to forces (like Coriolis) which do no work. Taken as matrix valued - say, in basis of adjoint representation of a Lie algebra $`g`$ of a compact group $`𝒢`$ \- it defines a vector space $`V^n`$ added on to the space of tangents at each point of $`M^d`$, to give interaction space $`M^{d+n}`$ $`=`$ $`M^d\times 𝒢`$ locally. Since, for $`m0`$, the fields are defined over doublesheeted hyperboloid/cone, a particle may be conceived of as surrounded by fluctuating clouds of virtual particles and antiparticles, as well $`A_\mu `$ modes in which they may unite to go back and forth. We now make a drastic assumption: the entire energy $`m`$ of a typical particle is determined by energy of a ‘mean’ Newtonian oscillator relative to proper time $`\tau `$; viz.

$$\frac{1}{2}\mu \left(\frac{d\xi }{d\tau }\right)^2+\frac{1}{2}\omega ^2\xi ^2=\frac{1}{m}P_\mu P_\mu =m=m\frac{dt^2d\stackrel{}{X}^2}{d\tau ^2}.$$

For time-fluctuation $`\xi `$ $`=`$ $`t`$, de Sitter space obtains as relativistic analogue of uniform acceleration. For spatial-fluctuation in $`N`$-dimensions, one obtains $`5`$-dimensional anti-de Sitter (Ads) space $`\times `$ $`S^{m1}`$. Spatial part of Ads, in these coordinates, is a space of negative constant curvature, rewritten as

$$ds_4^2=R^2\left[d\alpha ^2+(\mathrm{sinh}\alpha )^2d\mathrm{\Omega }_3^{2}\right].$$

Analogue of Coulomb potential in such $`N`$-space is

$$\psi _N=(\mathrm{cosech}\alpha )^{N1}𝑑\alpha \stackrel{r=\alpha RR\mathrm{}}{}\frac{mGR^{N3}}{r^{N2}}.$$

For $`N=3`$ it is $`(1\mathrm{coth}\alpha )`$ $``$ $`MG/r`$; the Schrödinger operator in space of negative curvature with this potential has finite number of eigenvalues; and as model of ‘black hole interior’ lowest eigenvalue gives measure of (BH entropy)2 . For $`N=4`$ for large $`R`$, potential is $`\lambda r^2`$, for which the flat space Schrödinger operator has $`s`$-state eigenvalues

$$E_n\mathrm{exp}[2B(2n+1)\pi (4\lambda 1)],$$

where each real $`B0`$ defines a new self-adjoint extension of Hamiltonian, with $`B`$ $``$ $`B+M\pi `$ $`(n,M=\pm \mathrm{integers})`$ leaving all unchanged. A particular disadvantage is that point spectrum extends from $`\mathrm{}`$ to $`0`$. Consider now the bundle of all such extensions, and pick a subset where $`M`$ and $`2n+1`$ adjust to give a finite lower bound (even degenerate) with proper orthogonality (and completeness, with continuous spectrum) preserved. Thus particles sit here confined, as if free, but in a higher dimensional space with strong gravity; and singularity is avoided. For the case of the phase operator, bundle of all its extensions give  the $`kq`$-representation of Zak. Such interpretation is yet unavailable for $`B`$.

All four mechanisms cited (spontaneous spin/torsion or projective change; non-global, incomplete Hamiltonians; Relativistic interaction space), enabling avoidance of singularity, have a common denominator - arbitrariness in quantifying available interaction energy (viz. gravitational in GR, mechanics, and particle interactions) inherent in the definition of space in which the energy ‘resides’. In that sense it is a tautology and evidence of consistency of the systems considered.

Acknowledgements: This work forms part of a larger study of Origin and Structure of Time to appear in the e-print Archive. The ideas in Sec. 4 were originally floated at Boulder in 1970. Thanks are due to R. Jagannathan for invaluable help.