Search Publications
Optical Time-series Photometry of the Symbiotic Nova V1835 Aquilae
Layden, Andrew C.; Caddy, Robert V.; Reichart, Daniel E. +7 more
We present time-series CCD photometry in the BVRI passbands of the recently identified symbiotic nova V1835 Aquilae (NSV 11749) over an interval of 5.1 yr with 7-14 day cadence, observed during its quiescence. We find slow light variations with a range of ~0.9 mag in V and ~0.3 mag in I. Analysis of these data show strong periodicity at 419 ± 10 d…
Charge-injection Device Imaging of Sirius with Contrast Ratios Greater than 1:26 Million
Sawant, Sailee M.; Batcheldor, Daniel
The intrinsic nature of many astronomical objects, such as binary and multiple systems, exoplanets, circumstellar and debris disks, and quasar host galaxies, introduces challenging requirements for observational instrumentation and techniques. In each case, we encounter situations where the light from bright sources hampers our ability to detect s…
Observational and Theoretical Studies of 27 δ Scuti Stars with Investigation of the Period-Luminosity Relation
Davoudi, Fatemeh; Poro, Atila; Paki, Ehsan +11 more
The multi-color CCD photometric study of 27 δ Scuti stars is presented. By using approximately three years of photometric observations, we obtained the times of maxima and magnitude changes during the observation time interval for each star. The ephemerides of our δ Scuti stars were calculated based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method us…
The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: MeerKAT Target Selection
de Pater, Imke; DeBoer, David; Gajjar, Vishal +18 more
New radio telescope arrays offer unique opportunities for large-scale commensal SETI surveys. Ethernet-based architectures are allowing multiple users to access telescope data simultaneously by means of multicast Ethernet subscriptions. Breakthrough Listen will take advantage of this by conducting a commensal SETI survey on the MeerKAT radio teles…
The Lyman Alpha Spectral Database (LASD)
Hayes, Matthew; Gronke, Max; Runnholm, Axel
Lymanα (Lyα) emission from star-forming galaxies is an important tool to study a large range of astrophysical questions: it has the potential to carry information about the source galaxy, its nearby circumgalactic medium, and also the surrounding intergalactic medium. Substantial observational and theoretical work has therefore focused on understa…
Proper Plasma Analysis Practice (PPAP), an Integrated Procedure of Extinction Correction and Plasma Diagnostics: A Demo with an HST/WFC3 Image Set of NGC 6720
Ueta, Toshiya; Otsuka, Masaaki
In this work, we propose a proper plasma analysis practice (PPAP), an updated procedure of plasma diagnostics in the era of spatially resolved spectroscopy. In particular, we emphasize the importance of performing both of the extinction correction and the direct method of plasma diagnostics simultaneously as an integrated process. This approach is…
The Weizmann Fast Astronomical Survey Telescope (W-FAST): System Overview
Gal-Yam, Avishay; Ofek, Eran O.; Yaron, Ofer +8 more
A relatively unexplored phase space of transients and stellar variability is that of second and sub-second timescales. We describe a new optical observatory operating in the Negev desert in Israel, with a 55 cm aperture, a field of view of 2°6 × 2°6 (≈7 deg2) equipped with a high frame rate, low read noise, CMOS camera. The system can o…
Probing the Astrometric Properties of Gaia EDR3 Quasars at the Faintest Magnitudes
Liao, Shilong; Qi, Zhaoxiang; Tang, Zhenghong +3 more
Gaia early data release 3 (EDR3) provides about 1.6 million QSO-like objects. Measuring the systematic residuals of the quasars convincingly in Gaia EDR3 is paramount for further fundamental astronomy use. We aim to conduct an independent assessment of the astrometric quality of Gaia EDR3 utilizing a sizable and confirmed extragalactic sources cat…
Asteroid Observations from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite: Detection Processing Pipeline and Results from Primary Mission Data
Pál, András; Vaillancourt, John E.; Kotson, Michael C. +7 more
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA Explorer-class mission designed for finding exoplanets around nearby stars. TESS image data can also serve as a valuable resource for asteroid and comet detection, including near-Earth objects (NEOs). In order to exploit the TESS image data for moving object detection and potential object …
Sparse Box-fitting Least Squares
Zucker, Shay; Panahi, Aviad
We present a new implementation of the commonly used Box-fitting Least Squares (BLS) algorithm, for the detection of transiting exoplanets in photometric data. Unlike BLS, our new implementation—Sparse BLS, does not use binning of the data into phase bins, nor does it use any kind of phase grid. Thus, its detection efficiency does not depend on th…