Search Publications
DustPedia: A Definitive Study of Cosmic Dust in the Local Universe
Bianchi, S.; Smith, M.; Fritz, J. +20 more
The European Space Agency has invested heavily in two cornerstones missions: Herschel and Planck. The legacy data from these missions provides an unprecedented opportunity to study cosmic dust in galaxies so that we can, for example, answer fundamental questions about the origin of the chemical elements, physical processes in the interstellar medi…
The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Target Selection of Nearby Stars and Galaxies
DeBoer, David; Marcy, Geoffrey W.; Siemion, Andrew P. V. +10 more
We present the target selection for the Breakthrough Listen search for extraterrestrial intelligence during the first year of observations at the Green Bank Telescope, Parkes Telescope, and Automated Planet Finder. On the way to observing 1,000,000 nearby stars in search of technological signals, we present three main sets of objects we plan to ob…
Astrometric Calibration and Performance of the Dark Energy Camera
Benoit-Lévy, A.; Bechtol, K.; Smith, M. +54 more
We characterize the ability of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to perform relative astrometry across its 500 Mpix, 3-deg2 science field of view and across four years of operation. This is done using internal comparisons of ∼4 × 107 measurements of high signal-to-noise ratio stellar images obtained in repeat visits to fields of…
Instrumental response model and detrending for the Dark Energy Camera
Abbott, T. M. C.; Desai, S.; Gruen, D. +12 more
We describe the model for mapping from sky brightness to the digital output of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) and the algorithms adopted by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) for inverting this model to obtain photometric measures of celestial objects from the raw camera output. This calibration aims for fluxes that are uniform across the camera field o…
Astrometry with Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensors—A Review
Nelan, Edmund P.; Harrison, Thomas E.; Benedict, G. Fritz +1 more
Over the last 20 years, Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensor interferometric astrometry has produced precise and accurate parallaxes of astrophysical interesting stars and mass estimates for stellar companions. We review parallax results, and binary star and exoplanet mass determinations, and compare a subset of these parallaxes with prelim…
A New Method for Wide-field Near-IR Imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope
van Dokkum, Pieter G.; Franx, Marijn; Muzzin, Adam +6 more
We present a new technique for wide and shallow observations using the near-infrared channel of Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Wide-field near-IR surveys with HST are generally inefficient, as guide star acquisitions make it impractical to observe more than one pointing per orbit. This limitation can be circumvente…
The SCUBA-2 850 µm Follow-up of WISE-selected, Luminous Dust-obscured Quasars
Knudsen, Kirsten K.; Fan, Lulu; Han, Yunkun +1 more
Hot dust-obscured galaxies (Hot DOGs) are a new population recently discovered in the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer All-Sky survey. Multiwavelength follow-up observations suggest that they are luminous, dust-obscured quasars at high redshift. Here we present the JCMT SCUBA-2 850 µm follow-up observations of 10 Hot DOGs. Four out of ten…
Visualization of Multi-mission Astronomical Data with ESASky
de Marchi, Guido; Merín, Bruno; O'Mullane, William +17 more
ESASky is a science-driven discovery portal to explore the multi-wavelength sky and visualize and access multiple astronomical archive holdings. The tool is a web application that requires no prior knowledge of any of the missions involved and gives users world-wide simplified access to the highest-level science data products from multiple astrono…
Abundance Analyses of the New R Coronae Borealis Stars: ASAS-RCB-8 and ASAS-RCB-10
Kamath, Devika; Pandey, Gajendra; Kameswara Rao, N. +3 more
Abundance analyses of the two newly discovered R Coronae Borealis (RCB) stars ASAS-RCB-8 and ASAS-RCB-10 were conducted using high-resolution optical spectra and model atmospheres. Their chemical compositions place the pair among the majority class of RCBs. ASAS-RCB-10 is one of the most N-poor majority RCBs with an above average O abundance. Rela…
Performance of an Algorithm for Estimation of Flux, Background, and Location on One-dimensional Signals
Busonero, D.; Cancelliere, R.; Gai, M.
Optimal estimation of signal amplitude, background level, and photocenter location is crucial to the combined extraction of astrometric and photometric information from focal plane images, in particular from the one-dimensional measurements performed by Gaia on intermediate to faint magnitude stars. Our goal is to define a convenient maximum likel…