Hi Miguel:
>> In the case of x- and gamma-rays though there is no confusion, so I >> would keep the existing names...
I gave those bands the names soft/medium/hard x-rays because I'm an x-ray man and I'm coming from an x/gamma-ray institute...
> I know that UCDs are not for humans, but asking about what soft and
> hard X-rays mean,
> the answer is highly dependent on the asked astronomer. Usually they
> talk only about
> soft and hard. "medium-Xrays" is not understood. In fact, most people
> I asked consider
> hard X-ray as aprox 4-10 keV band (from maximmun energy from ROSAT/
> EINSTEIN to max energy by CHANDRA/ASCA/XMM)..... I do not know, but I
> think that
> keep em.X-ray.soft medium and hard is misunderstanding for X-ray
> people. Another example,
> ROSAT has a "hardness" ratio that is 0.2 keV-1.5keV (soft) vs. 1-4kev
> (hard) (I do not remember exactly the
> energies, sorry) where "soft" and "hard" refers to the detectors in
> ROSAT (but they are used in this way in the articles)....
You are perfectly right, usually they think in terms of the bandpass of their instrument. 4 keV are hard for ROSAT people because 4keV is hardER than 0.2 keV (their soft limit). For XMM people 10keV are hard. For BeppoSAX people 10 keV are medium, because the bandpass reaches 2-300 keV. We should not forget that we are parsing the em spectrum, we have to describe it, not the bandpasses of instruments. So, to avoid a narrow-minded interpretation of the ucd-words em.X-ray.* your suggestion (use energies instead of labels) is the safest one.
> In gamma ray, the situation is similar. You can take a look the
> INTEGRAL instruments, or CGRO ones.
> The problem is that each energy range use techniques completely
> different (due to the physics of the process) and em.gamma.hard is to
> wide! It includes from only space instruments to only ground based
> instruments (using the atmosphere as detector). In fact some gamma-
> ray people make distinction between gamma-ray VeryHigh gamma-rays and
> Ultra-High gamma rays as clearly different parts of the
> electromagnetic spectrum....
I agree that gamma.hard is rather wide!! Probably we should go for
at least three bands:
hard/high
VeryHigh
UltraHigh
Andrea
Andrea Preite Martinez andrea-at-rm.iasf.cnr.it Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale Tel.:+39.06.4993.4641 Area di Ricerca di Tor Vergata Fax.:+39.06.2066.0188 Via del Fosso del Cavaliere 100 Cell:+39.339.381735500133 Roma