Search Publications
Photometric flaring fraction of M dwarf stars from the SkyMapper Southern Survey
Wolf, Christian; Onken, Christopher A.; Chang, Seo-Won
We present our search for flares from M dwarf stars in the SkyMapper Southern Survey DR1, which covers nearly the full Southern hemisphere with six-filter sequences that are repeatedly observed in the passbands uvgriz. This allows us to identify bona fide flares in single-epoch observations on time-scales of less than four minutes. Using a correla…
Sudden and steady orbital period changes across the classical nova eruptions of DQ Her and BT Mon
Schaefer, Bradley E.
I report two new measures of the sudden change in the orbital period (P) across the nova eruption (ΔP) and the steady period change in quiescence (\dot{P}) for classical novae (CNe) DQ Her and BT Mon. The fractional changes (ΔP/P) in parts per million (ppm) are -4.46 ± 0.03 for DQ Her and +39.6 ± 0.5 for BT Mon. For BT Mon, the ΔP/P value is not l…
Deep XMM-Newton observations of the most distant SPT-SZ galaxy cluster
Allen, Steven W.; Bayliss, Matthew; Canning, Rebecca E. A. +5 more
We present results from a 577 ks XMM-Newton observation of SPT-CL J0459-4947, the most distant cluster detected in the South Pole Telescope 2500 square degree (SPT-SZ) survey, and currently the most distant cluster discovered through its Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. The data confirm the cluster's high redshift, z = 1.71 ± 0.02, in agreement with ear…
An ALMA survey of the SCUBA-2 cosmology legacy survey UKIDSS/UDS field: Dust attenuation in high-redshift Lyman-break galaxies
Thomson, A. P.; Ivison, R. J.; Scott, D. +27 more
We analyse 870 µm Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) dust continuum detections of 41 canonically selected z ≃ 3 Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs), as well as 209 ALMA-undetected LBGs, in follow-up of SCUBA-2 mapping of the UKIDSS Ultra Deep Survey (UDS) field. We find that our ALMA-bright LBGs lie significantly off the local IRX-beta relation a…
Eta carinae and the homunculus: far infrared/submillimetre spectral lines detected with the Herschel Space Observatory
Gull, T. R.; Nielsen, K. E.; Morris, P. W. +4 more
The evolved massive binary star η Carinae underwent eruptive mass-loss events that formed the complex bi-polar 'Homunculus' nebula harbouring tens of solar masses of unusually nitrogen-rich gas and dust. Despite expectations for the presence of a significant molecular component to the gas, detections have been observationally challenged by limited…
A blinding solution for inference from astronomical data
Sellentin, Elena
This paper presents a joint blinding and deblinding strategy for inference of physical laws from astronomical data. The strategy allows for up to three blinding stages, where the data may be blinded, the computations of theoretical physics may be blinded, and -assuming Gaussianly distributed data - the covariance matrix may be blinded. We found co…
Empirical completeness assessment of the Gaia DR2, Pan-STARRS 1, and ASAS-SN-II RR Lyrae catalogues
Mateu, Cecilia; Holl, Berry; Rimoldini, Lorenzo +1 more
RR Lyrae stars are an important and widely used tracer of the most ancient populations of our Galaxy, mainly due to their standard candle nature. The current availability of large-scale surveys of variable stars is allowing us to trace the structure of our entire Galaxy, even in previously inaccessible areas like the Galactic disc. In this work, w…
The nearby spiral density-wave structure of the Galaxy: line-of-sight velocities of the Gaia DR2 main-sequence A, F, G, and K stars
Hou, Li-Gang; Gedalin, Michael; Jiang, Ing-Guey +2 more
Distances and velocities of ≈ 2400 000 main-sequence A, F, G, and K stars are collected from the second data release of ESA's Gaia astrometric mission. This material is analysed to find evidence of radial and azimuthal systematic non-circular motions of stars in the solar neighbourhood on the assumption that the system is subject to spiral density…
A kinematically hot population of young stars in the solar neighbourhood
Jeffries, R. D.; Wright, N. J.; Binks, A. S.
In the last three decades several hundred nearby members of young stellar moving groups (MGs) have been identified, but there has been less systematic effort to quantify or characterize young stars that do not belong to previously identified MGs. Using a kinematically unbiased sample of 225 lithium-rich stars within 100 pc, we find that only 50 ± …
Systematic errors in dust mass determinations: insights from laboratory opacity measurements
Fanciullo, Lapo; Kemper, Francisca; Scicluna, Peter +2 more
The thermal emission of dust is one of the most important tracers of the interstellar medium: multiwavelength photometry in the far-infrared (FIR) and submillimetre (submm) can be fitted with a model, providing estimates of the dust mass. The fit results depend on the assumed value for FIR/submm opacity, which in most models - due to the scarcity,…