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…
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…
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 …
Synthesis of radioactive elements in novae and supernovae and their use as a diagnostic tool
Hernanz, M.; Siegert, T.; Vink, J. +5 more
Novae and supernovae play a key role in many fields of Astrophysics and Cosmology. Despite their importance, an accurate description of which objects explode and why and how they explode is still lacking. One of the main characteristics of such explosions is that they are the main suppliers of newly synthesized chemical elements in the Galaxy. Sin…
OB Associations and their origins
Wright, Nicholas J.
OB associations are unbound groups of young stars made prominent by their bright OB members, and have long been thought to be the expanded remnants of dense star clusters. They have been important in astrophysics for over a century thanks to their luminous massive stars, though their low-mass members have not been well studied until the last coupl…
Surviving companions of Type Ia supernovae: theory and observations
Ruiz-Lapuente, Pilar
We review the theoretical background and the observational searches made for surviving companions of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). Theory comprises the characteristics of the stellar binary companions of the exploding white dwarfs at the time of the supernova outburst and the expected effects on them of the explosion, as well as their subsequent ev…
Kepler-62f: Kepler's first small planet in the habitable zone, but is it real?
Hedges, Christina; Agol, Eric; Borucki, William +1 more
Kepler-62f is the first exoplanet small enough to plausibly have a rocky composition orbiting within the habitable zone (HZ) discovered by the Kepler Mission. The planet is 1.4 times the size of the Earth and has an orbital period of 267 days. At the time of its discovery, it had the longest period of any small planet in the habitable zone of a mu…