Search Publications
A deep-learning search for technosignatures from 820 nearby stars
de Pater, Imke; Gajjar, Vishal; Siemion, Andrew P. V. +14 more
The goal of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is to quantify the prevalence of technological life beyond Earth via their `technosignatures'. One theorized technosignature is narrowband Doppler drifting radio signals. The principal challenge in conducting SETI in the radio domain is developing a generalized technique to reject hum…
An 18.9 min blue large-amplitude pulsator crossing the `Hertzsprung gap' of hot subdwarfs
Filippenko, Alexei V.; Esamdin, Ali; Wang, Xiaofeng +28 more
Blue large-amplitude pulsators (BLAPs) represent a new and rare class of hot pulsating stars with unusually large amplitudes and short periods. The evolutionary path that could give rise to such kinds of stellar configurations is unclear. Here we report a comprehensive study of the peculiar BLAP discovered by the Tsinghua University-Ma Huateng Tel…
Direct observations of a complex coronal web driving highly structured slow solar wind
Chitta, L. P.; Seaton, D. B.; DeForest, C. E. +2 more
The solar wind consists of continuous streams of charged particles that escape into the heliosphere from the Sun, and is split into fast and slow components, with the fast wind emerging from the interiors of coronal holes. Near the ecliptic plane, the fast wind from low-latitude coronal holes is interspersed with a highly structured slow solar win…
Thermal and chemical properties of the eROSITA bubbles from Suzaku observations
Mathur, Smita; Gupta, Anjali; Kingsbury, Joshua +2 more
The X-ray bright bubbles at the Galactic Centre provide an opportunity to understand the effects of feedback on galaxy evolution. The shells of the eROSITA bubbles show enhanced X-ray emission over the sky background. Previously, these shells were assumed to have a single temperature component and to trace the shock-heated lower-temperature halo g…
JWST/NIRCam detections of dusty subsolar-mass young stellar objects in the Small Magellanic Cloud
Hirschauer, Alec S.; Fahrion, Katja; Lenkić, Laura +23 more
Low-mass stars are the most numerous stellar objects in the Universe. Before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we had limited knowledge of how planetary systems around low-mass stars could form at subsolar metallicities. Here we present JWST observations of NGC 346, a star-forming region in the metal-poor Small Magellanic Cloud, revealing a s…
Complete replacement of magnetic flux in a flux rope during a coronal mass ejection
Veronig, Astrid M.; Li, Ting; Wang, Yuming +5 more
Solar coronal mass ejections are the most energetic events in the Solar System. In their standard formation model, a magnetic flux rope builds up into a coronal mass ejection through magnetic reconnection that continually converts overlying, untwisted magnetic flux into twisted flux enveloping the pre-existing rope. However, only a minority of cor…
The impact of satellite trails on Hubble Space Telescope observations
Popescu, Marcel; Merín, Bruno; McCaughrean, Mark J. +8 more
The recent launch of low Earth orbit satellite constellations is creating a growing threat for astronomical observations with ground-based telescopes1-10 that has alarmed the astronomical community 11-16. Observations affected by artificial satellites can become unusable for scientific research, wasting a growing fraction of …
Accurate oxygen abundance of interstellar gas in Mrk 71 from optical and infrared spectra
Weiner, Benjamin; Spilker, Justin; Fadda, Dario +9 more
The heavy element content (`metallicity') of the Universe is a record of the total star formation history. Gas-phase metallicity in galaxies, as well as its evolution with time, is of particular interest as a tracer of accretion and outflow processes. However, metallicities from the widely used electron temperature (Te) method are typic…
Universality in the random walk structure function of luminous quasi-stellar objects
Tang, Ji-Jia; Wolf, Christian; Tonry, John
Rapidly growing black holes are surrounded by accretion disks that make them the brightest objects in the Universe. Their brightness is known to be variable, but the causes of this are not implied by simple disk models and still debated. Due to the small size of accretion disks and their great distance, there are no resolved images addressing the …
The use of double-mode RR Lyrae stars as robust distance and metallicity indicators
Wang, Shu; Deng, Licai; Chen, Xiaodian +1 more
RR Lyrae stars are one of the primary distance indicators for old stellar populations such as globular clusters, dwarf galaxies and galaxies. Typically, fundamental-mode RR Lyr stars are used for distance measurements, and their accuracy is strongly limited by the dependence of absolute magnitudes on metallicity, in both the optical and infrared b…