Search Publications
Stellar streams in the Gaia era
Price-Whelan, Adrian M.; Bonaca, Ana
The hierarchical model of galaxy formation predicts that the Milky Way halo is populated by tidal debris of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Due to long dynamical times, debris from the lowest mass objects remains coherent as thin and dynamically cold stellar streams for billions of years. The Gaia mission, providing astrometry and spectropho…
Martian hydrosphere: A brief overview of water on Mars
Gopalchetty, Brahma
Understanding the status of water on Mars is crucial for evaluating its capacity to support life and to serve as a resource for future possible human exploration. Investigations have been carried out in the past to find signs of water in its past or present states. It is generally agreed that Mars had significant amounts of water early in its exis…
Gaia's binary star renaissance
El-Badry, Kareem
Stellar multiplicity is among the oldest and richest problems in astrophysics. Binary stars are a cornerstone of stellar mass and radius measurements that underpin modern stellar evolutionary models. Binaries are the progenitors of many of the most interesting and exotic astrophysical phenomena, ranging from type Ia supernovae to gamma ray bursts,…
Galactic Archaeology with Gaia
Belokurov, Vasily; Deason, Alis J.
The Gaia mission has revolutionized our view of the Milky Way and its satellite citizens. The field of Galactic Archaeology has been piecing together the formation and evolution of the Galaxy for decades, and we have made great strides, with often limited data, towards discovering and characterizing the subcomponents of the Galaxy and its building…
The Gaia white dwarf revolution
Munday, James; Sahu, Snehalata; Tremblay, Pier-Emmanuel +4 more
This review highlights the role of the Gaia space mission in transforming white dwarf research. These stellar remnants constitute 5%–7% of the local stellar population in volume, yet before Gaia the lack of trigonometric parallaxes hindered their identification. The mission's Data Release 2 in 2018 provided the first unbiased colour-absolute magni…
How Gaia sheds light on the Milky Way star cluster population
Casamiquela, L.; Cantat-Gaudin, T.
Star clusters are among the first celestial objects catalogued by early astronomers. As simple and coeval populations, their study has been instrumental in charting the properties of the Milky Way and providing insight into stellar evolution through the 20th century. Clusters were traditionally spotted as local stellar overdensities in the plane o…
Observations of pre- and proto-brown dwarfs in nearby clouds: Paving the way to further constraining theories of brown dwarf formation
Lee, Chang Won; Dunham, Michael M.; Palau, Aina +2 more
Brown Dwarfs (BDs) are crucial objects in our understanding of both star and planet formation, as well as in our understanding of what mechanisms shape the lower end of the Initial Mass Function (IMF). However, since the discovery of the first BD in 1995, there is still an unconcluded debate about which is the dominant formation mechanism of these…
Challenges for ΛCDM: An update
Perivolaropoulos, L.; Skara, F.
A number of challenges to the standard ΛCDM model have been emerging during the past few years as the accuracy of cosmological observations improves. In this review we discuss in a unified manner many existing signals in cosmological and astrophysical data that appear to be in some tension (2 σ or larger) with the standard ΛCDM model as specified …
Black holes at cosmic dawn in the redshifted 21cm signal of HI
Mirabel, I. F.; Rodríguez, L. F.
The first stars (Pop III stars) and Black Holes (BHs) formed in galaxies at Cosmic Dawn (CD) have not been observed and remain poorly constrained. Theoretical models predict that indirect insights of those Pop III stars and BHs could be imprinted as an absorption signal in the 21cm line of the atomic hydrogen (HI) in the cold Intergalactic Medium …
Jets from young stars
Ray, T. P.; Ferreira, J.
Jets are ubiquitous in the Universe and are seen from a large number of astrophysical objects including active galactic nuclei, gamma ray bursters, micro-quasars, proto-planetary nebulae, young stars and even brown dwarfs. In every case they seem to be accompanied by an accretion disk and, while the detailed physics may change, it has been suggest…