The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) has passed national acceptance and finished one pilot cycle of ‘Shared-Risk’ observations. It will start formal operation soon. In this context, this paper describes testing results of key fundamental parameters for FAST, aiming to provide basic support for observation and data reduction of FAST for scientific researchers. The 19-beam receiver covering 1.05–1.45 GHz was utilized for most of these observations. The fluctuation in electronic gain of the system is better than 1% over 3.5 hours, enabling enough stability for observations. Pointing accuracy, aperture efficiency and system temperature are three key parameters for FAST. The measured standard deviation of pointing accuracy is 7.9″, which satisfies the initial design of FAST. When zenith angle is less than 26.4°, the aperture efficiency and system temperature around 1.4 GHz are ∼0.63 and less than 24 K for central beam, respectively. The sensitivity and stability of the 19-beam backend are confirmed to satisfy expectation by spectral Hi observations toward NGC 672 and polarization observations toward 3C 286. The performance allows FAST to take sensitive observations for various scientific goals, from studies of pulsars to galaxy evolution.

Context. The spiral structure of our Milky Way Galaxy is not yet known. HII regions and giant molecular clouds are the most prominent spiral tracers. Models with 2−4 arms have been proposed to outline the structure of our Galaxy. Aims. Recently, new data of spiral tracers covering a larger region of the Galactic disk have been published. We wish to outline the spiral structure of the Milky way using all tracer data. Methods. We collected the spiral tracer data of our Milky Way from the literature, namely, HII regions and giant molecular clouds (GMCs). With weighting factors based on the excitation parameters of HII regions or the masses of GMCs, we fitted the distribution of these tracers with models of two, three, four spiral-arms or polynomial spiral arms. The distances of tracers, if not available from stellar or direct measurements, were estimated kinetically from the standard rotation curve of Brand & Blitz (1993, A&A, 275, 67) with R 0 = 8.5 kpc, and Θ 0 = 220 km s −1 or the newly fitted rotation curves with R 0 = 8.0 kpc and Θ 0 = 220 km s −1 or R 0 = 8.4 kpc and Θ 0 = 254 km s −1 . Results. We found that the two-arm logarithmic model cannot fit the data in many regions. The three-and the four-arm logarithmic models are able to connect most tracers. However, at least two observed tangential directions cannot be matched by the three-or four-arm model. We composed a polynomial spiral arm model, which can not only fit the tracer distribution but also match observed tangential directions. Using new rotation curves with R 0 = 8.0 kpc and Θ 0 = 220 km s −1 and R 0 = 8.4 kpc and Θ 0 = 254 km s −1 for the estimation of kinematic distances, we found that the distribution of HII regions and GMCs can fit the models well, although the results do not change significantly compared to the parameters with the standard R 0 and Θ 0 .

Discovery of pulsars is one of the main goals for large radio telescopes. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), that incorporates an L-band 19-beam receiver with a system temperature of about 20 K, is the most sensitive radio telescope utilized for discovering pulsars. We designed the snapshot observation mode for a FAST key science project, the Galactic Plane Pulsar Snapshot (GPPS) survey, in which every four nearby pointings can observe a cover of a sky patch of 0.1575 square degrees through beam-switching of the L-band 19-beam receiver. The integration time for each pointing is 300 seconds so that the GPPS observations for a cover can be made in 21 minutes. The goal of the GPPS survey is to discover pulsars within the Galactic latitude of ± 10° from the Galactic plane, and the highest priority is given to the inner Galaxy within ± 5°. Up to now, the GPPS survey has discovered 201 pulsars, including currently the faintest pulsars which cannot be detected by other telescopes, pulsars with extremely high dispersion measures (DMs) which challenge the currently widely used models for the Galactic electron density distribution, pulsars coincident with supernova remnants, 40 millisecond pulsars, 16 binary pulsars, some nulling and mode-changing pulsars and rotating radio transients (RRATs). The follow-up observations for confirmation of new pulsars have polarization-signals recorded for polarization profiles of the pulsars. Re-detection of previously known pulsars in the survey data also leads to significant improvements in parameters for 64 pulsars. The GPPS survey discoveries are published and will be updated at http://zmtt.bao.ac.cn/GPPS/.

A power-efficient frequency compensation topology, Impedance Adapting Compensation (IAC), is presented in this paper. This IAC topology has, on one hand, a normal Miller capacitor, which is still needed to provide an internal negative feedback loop, and on the other hand, a serial RC impedance as a load to the intermediate stage, improving performance parameters such as stability, gain-bandwidth product and power dissipation.A three-stage IAC amplifier was implemented and fabricated in a 0.35 m CMOS technology. Experiment results show that the implemented IAC amplifier, driving a 150 pF load capacitance, achieved a gain-bandwidth product (GBW) of 4.4 MHz while dissipating only 30 W power with a 1.5 V supply.

The structure and evolution of the spiral arms of our Milky Way are basic but long-standing questions in astronomy. In particular, the lifetime of spiral arms is still a puzzle and has not been well constrained from observations. In this work, we aim to inspect these issues using a large catalogue of open clusters. We compiled a catalogue of 3794 open clusters based on Gaia EDR3. A majority of these clusters have accurately determined parallaxes, proper motions, and radial velocities. The age parameters for these open clusters are collected from references or calculated in this work. In order to understand the nearby spiral structure and its evolution, we analysed the distributions, kinematic properties, vertical distributions, and regressed properties of subsamples of open clusters. We find evidence that the nearby spiral arms are compatible with a long-lived spiral pattern and might have remained approximately stable for the past 80 million years. In particular, the Local Arm, where our Sun is currently located, is also suggested to be long-lived in nature and probably a major arm segment of the Milky Way. The evolutionary characteristics of nearby spiral arms show that the dynamic spiral mechanism might be not prevalent for our Galaxy. Instead, density wave theory is more consistent with the observational properties of open clusters.

The morphology and kinematics of the spiral structure of the Milky Way are long-standing problems in astrophysics. In this review we firstly summarize various methods with different tracers used to solve this puzzle. The astrometry of Galactic sources is gradually alleviating this difficult situation caused mainly by large distance uncertainties, as we can currently obtain accurate parallaxes (a few µas) and proper motions (≈1 km s −1 ) by using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). On the other hand, the Gaia mission is providing the largest, uniform sample of parallaxes for O-type stars in the entire Milky Way. Based upon the VLBI maser and Gaia O-star parallax measurements, nearby spiral structures of the Perseus, Local, Sagittarius and Scutum Arms are determined in unprecedented detail. Meanwhile, we estimate fundamental Galactic parameters of the distance to the Galactic center, R 0 , to be 8.35±0.18 kpc, and circular rotation speed at the Sun, Θ 0 , to be 240±10 km s −1 . We found kinematic differences between O stars and interstellar masers: the O stars, on average, rotate faster, >8 km s −1 than maser-traced high-mass star forming regions.

Ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) are interesting objects with dramatic properties. Many efforts have been made to understand the physics of their luminous infrared emission and evolutionary stages. However, a large ULIRG sample is still needed to study the properties of their central black holes (BHs), the BH−host galaxy relation, and their evolution. We identified 308 ULIRGs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 6, and classified them into the NL ULIRGs (with only narrow emission lines) and the Type I ULIRGs (with broad emission lines). About 56% of ULIRGs in our total sample show interaction features, and this percentage is 79% for redshift z < 0.2. Optical identifications of these ULIRGs show that the active galactic nucleus percentage is at least 49%, and the percentage increases with the infrared luminosity. We found 62 Type I ULIRGs, and estimated their BH masses and velocity dispersions from their optical spectra. Together with known Type I ULIRGs in the literature, a sample of 90 Type I ULIRGs enables us to make a statistical study. We found that the BH masses of Type I ULIRGs are typically smaller than those of Palomar−Green (PG QSOs), and most Type I ULIRGs follow the M BH −σ relation. However, some ULIRGs with a larger Eddington ratio deviate from this relation, even though the line width of the [O III ] narrow-line (NL) core or the [S II ] line was used as the surrogate of velocity dispersion. This implies that at least some ULIRGs are probably still in the early evolution stage toward QSOs. The anti-correlation between the mass deviation from the M BH −σ relation and the Eddington ratio supports that the evolution of Type I ULIRGs is probably followed by the building up of the M BH −σ relation and the evolution to the QSO phase.

The Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been recognized as a paradigm to solve System-on-Chip (SoC) design challenges. The routing algorithm is one of key researches of a NoC design. XY routing algorithm, which is a kind of distributed deterministic routing algorithms, is simple to be implemented. Odd-Even (OE) routing algorithm, whose implementation is complex, is a sort of distributed adaptive routing algorithms with deadlock-free ability. We demonstrate the two routing algorithms in details at first. XY routing algorithm and OE routing algorithm are then simulated and compared based on a 3X3 mesh topology NoC with NIRGAM simulator. The simulation results show that OE routing algorithm, whose P parameter equals to 1.09, increases P parameter greatly as compared to XY routing algorithm, whose P parameter equals to 0.86, in a 2-dimension 3X3 mesh topology NoC, with Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic condition of each tail.