Search Publications
Elemental and molecular abundances in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Mall, Urs; De Keyser, Johan; Hansen, Kenneth C. +18 more
Comets are considered to be some of the most pristine and unprocessed Solar system objects accessible to in situ exploration. Investigating their molecular and elemental composition takes us on a journey back to the early period of our Solar system and possibly even further. In this work, we deduce the bulk abundances of the major volatile species…
The ASAS-SN catalogue of variable stars III: variables in the southern TESS continuous viewing zone
Kochanek, C. S.; Stanek, K. Z.; Dong, Subo +13 more
The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) provides long-baseline (∼4 yr) light curves for sources brighter than V ≲ 17 mag across the whole sky. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has started to produce high-quality light curves with a baseline of at least 27 d, eventually for most of the sky. The combination of ASAS-SN a…
Simultaneous calibration of spectro-photometric distances and the Gaia DR2 parallax zero-point offset with deep learning
Bovy, Jo; Leung, Henry W.
Gaia measures the five astrometric parameters for stars in the Milky Way, but only four of them (positions and proper motion, but not distance) are well measured beyond a few kpc from the Sun. Modern spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE cover a large area of the Milky Way disc and we can use the relation between spectra and luminosity to determine…
The afterglow and kilonova of the short GRB 160821B
Troja, E.; Cenko, S. B.; Sakamoto, T. +24 more
GRB 160821B is a short duration gamma-ray burst (GRB) detected and localized by the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in the outskirts of a spiral galaxy at z = 0.1613, at a projected physical offset of 16 kpc from the galaxy's center. We present X-ray, optical/nIR, and radio observations of its counterpart and model them with two distinct components…
A long-lived neutron star merger remnant in GW170817: constraints and clues from X-ray observations
Troja, E.; Piro, L.; van Eerten, H. +12 more
Multimessenger observations of GW170817 have not conclusively established whether the merger remnant is a black hole (BH) or a neutron star (NS). We show that a long-lived magnetized NS with a poloidal field B ≈ 1012 G is fully consistent with the electromagnetic dataset, when spin-down losses are dominated by gravitational wave (GW) em…
Characterizing circumgalactic gas around massive ellipticals at z ∼ 0.4 - II. Physical properties and elemental abundances
Weiner, Benjamin J.; Johnson, Sean D.; Zahedy, Fakhri S. +5 more
We present a systematic investigation of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) within projected distances d < 160 kpc of luminous red galaxies (LRGs). The sample comprises 16 intermediate-redshift (z = 0.21-0.55) LRGs of stellar mass M_star> 10^{11} M_\odot. Combining far-ultraviolet Cosmic Origin Spectrograph spectra from the Hubble Space Telesco…
Three-dimensional interstellar dust reddening maps of the Galactic plane
Huang, Y.; Chen, B. -Q.; Wang, C. +6 more
We present new three-dimensional (3D) interstellar dust reddening maps of the Galactic plane in three colours, E(G - KS), E(GBP - GRP), and E(H - KS). The maps have a spatial angular resolution of 6 arcmin and covers over 7000 deg2 of the Galactic plane for Galactic longitude 0° < l < 36…
Distances and parallax bias in Gaia DR2
Schönrich, Ralph; Eyer, Laurent; McMillan, Paul
We derive Bayesian distances for all stars in the radial velocity sample of Gaia DR2, and use the statistical method of Schönrich, Binney & Asplund to validate the distances and test the Gaia parallaxes. In contrast to other methods, which rely on special sources, our method directly tests the distances to all stars in our sample. We find clea…
The discovery of weak coherent pulsations in the ultraluminous X-ray source NGC 1313 X-2
Fabian, A. C.; Pinto, C.; Bachetti, M. +8 more
We report the detection of weak pulsations from the archetypal ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) NGC 1313 X-2. Acceleration searches reveal sinusoidal pulsations in segments of two out of six new deep observations of this object, with a period of ∼1.5 s and a pulsed fraction of ∼ 5 per cent. We use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that the in…
Evolution of the galaxy stellar mass functions and UV luminosity functions at z = 6-9 in the Hubble Frontier Fields
Conselice, Christopher J.; Bhatawdekar, Rachana; Duncan, Kenneth +1 more
We present new measurements of the evolution of the galaxy stellar mass functions (GSMFs) and ultraviolet luminosity functions (UV LFs) for galaxies from z = 6-9 within the Frontier Field cluster MACSJ0416.1-2403 and its parallel field. To obtain these results, we derive the stellar masses of our sample by fitting synthetic stellar population mode…