A long standing problem in the study of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) is that the observed VLBI core is in fact a blending of the actual AGN core (classically defined by the = 1 surface) and the upstream regions of the jet or optically thin flows. This blending may cause some biases in the observ- ables of the core, such as its flux density, size or brightness temperature, which may lead to misleading interpretation of the derived quantities and physics. We study the effects of such blending under the view of the Korean VLBI Network (KVN) for a sample of AGNs at 43 GHz by comparing their observed properties with observations obtained using the Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA). Our results suggest that the observed core sizes are a factor 11 larger than these of VLBA, which is similar to the factor expected by considering the different resolutions of the two facilities. We suggest the use of this factor to consider blending effects in KVN measurements. Other parameters, such as flux density or brightness temperature, seem to possess a more complicated dependence.
We report on the timing properties of the ‘Crab twin’ pulsar PSR B0540−69 measured with X-ray data taken with the Swift telescope over a period of 1100 days. The braking index of the pulsar was estimated to be n = 0.03±0.013 in a previous study performed in 2015 with 500-day Swift data. This small value of n is unusual for pulsars, and a comparison with an old estimate of n ≈ 2.1 for the same target determined ∼10 years earlier suggests a dramatic change in the braking index. To confirm the small value and therefore the large change of n, we used 1100-day Swift observations including the data used in the earlier determination of n = 0.03. In this study we find that the braking index of PSR B0540−69 is n = 0.163 ± 0.001, somewhat larger than 0.03. Since the measured value of n is still much smaller than 2.1, we can confirm the dramatic change in the braking index for this pulsar.
The New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST) is the largest solar telescope in China. When using CCDs for imaging, equal-thickness fringes caused by thin-film interference can occur. Such fringes reduce the quality of NVST data but cannot be removed using standard flat fielding. In this paper, a correction method based on multi-scale decomposition and adaptive partitioning is proposed. The original image is decomposed into several sub-scales by multi-scale decomposition. The region containing fringes is found and divided by an adaptive partitioning method. The interference fringes are then filtered by a frequency-domain Gaussian filter on every partitioned image. Our analysis shows that this method can effectively remove the interference fringes from a solar image while preserving useful information.