Search Publications
BOWIE-ALIGN: A JWST comparative survey of aligned versus misaligned hot Jupiters to test the dependence of atmospheric composition on migration history
Owen, James E.; Kirk, James; López-Morales, Mercedes +20 more
A primary objective of exoplanet atmosphere characterization is to learn about planet formation and evolution, however, this is challenged by degeneracies. To determine whether differences in atmospheric composition can be reliably traced to differences in evolution, we are undertaking a transmission spectroscopy survey with JWST to compare the co…
PYSSED: an automated method of collating and fitting stellar spectral energy distributions
McDonald, Iain; Zijlstra, Albert A.; Cox, Nick L. J. +4 more
Stellar atmosphere modelling predicts the luminosity and temperature of a star, together with parameters such as the effective gravity and the metallicity, by reproducing the observed spectral energy distribution. Most observational data come from photometric surveys, using a variety of passbands. We herein present the Python Stellar Spectral Ener…
On the nature of apparent transient sources on the National Geographic Society-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey glass copy plates
Hambly, N. C.; Blair, A.
We examine critically recent claims for the presence of above-atmosphere optical transients in publicly available digitized scans of Schmidt telescope photographic plate material derived from the National Geographic Society-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. We employ the publicly available SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey catalogues to examine statistically t…
Statistical properties of Hipparcos 2, caveats on its use, and a recalibration of the intermediate astrometric data
Brandt, Timothy D.; Brandt, G. Mirek; Michalik, Daniel
We revisit the Hipparcos 2007 re-reduction and find improvements to the catalogue by leveraging Gaia EDR3. We show that including a constant residual offset and additional dispersion (two free parameters in total) in the Hipparcos 2007 Intermediate Astrometric Data (IAD) creates a new catalogue with significantly better agreement with Gaia EDR3. T…
A reduction procedure and pipeline for the detection of trans-Neptunian objects using occultations
Ofek, Eran O.; Nir, Guy; Zackay, Barak
Kuiper belt objects smaller than a few kilometres are difficult to observe directly. They can be detected when they randomly occult a background star. Close to the ecliptic plane, each star is occulted once every tens of thousands of hours, and occultations typically last for less than a second. We present an algorithm, and companion pipeline, for…
Overcoming separation between counterparts due to unknown proper motions in catalogue cross-matching
Wilson, Tom J.
To perform precise and accurate photometric catalogue cross-matches - assigning counterparts between two separate data sets - we need to describe all possible sources of uncertainty in object position. With ever-increasing time baselines between observations, like 2MASS in 2001 and the next generation of surveys, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observat…
WDPhotTools - a white dwarf photometric toolkit in Python
Green, M. J.; Li, W.; Lam, M. C. +1 more
From data collection to photometric fitting and analysis of white dwarfs, to generating a white dwarf luminosity function requires numerous astrophysical, mathematical, and computational domain knowledge. The steep learning curve makes it difficult to enter the field, and often individuals have to reinvent the wheel to perform identical data reduc…