Related papers: The Expanding Photosphere Method: Progress and Pro…
Individual distances to planetary nebulae are of the utmost relevance for our understanding of post-asymptotic giant-branch evolution because they allow a precise determination of stellar and nebular properties. Also, objects with…
This article provides a new approach on how to enhance data storage and retrieval in the Query By Image Content Systems (QBIC) by introducing the ${\rm NEM}_{\sigma}$ distance measure, satisfying the relaxed triangle inequality. By…
ESPI has been proposed for direct imaging and spectral analysis of giant planets orbiting solar-type stars. ESPI extends the concept suggested by Nisenson and Papaliolios (2001) for a square aperture apodized telescope that has sufficient…
Strong gravitational lensing by massive galaxy clusters offers rare opportunities to observe multiple images of distant ($z \gtrsim 2$) Type Ia supernovae (SNe) and to resolve the properties of their host galaxies. A recent outstanding…
The principle of the background-eliminated extinction-parallax (BEEP) method is examining the extinction difference between on- and off-cloud regions to reveal the extinction jump caused by molecular clouds, thereby revealing the distance…
Light curves for RR Lyrae stars can be difficult to obtain properly in the K2 mission due to the similarities between the timescales of the observed physical phenomena and the instrumental signals appearing in the data. We developed a new…
Accurate astronomical distance determination is crucial for all fields in astrophysics, from Galactic to cosmological scales. Despite, or perhaps because of, significant efforts to determine accurate distances, using a wide range of…
We present methods and preliminary results of a relatively novel search for nearby stars. The method relies on photometric distance estimates as its primary search criterion, thus distinguishing itself from proper motion-based searches that…
In the last decade, over 7000 eclipsing binaries have been discovered in the Local Group through various variability surveys. Measuring fundamental parameters of these eclipsing binaries has become feasible with 8 meter class telescopes,…
We observed a test globule, B 335 in U, B, g, r, and I, and together with the 2MASS survey, this data set gives a well-defined spectral energy distribution (SED) of a large number of stars. The SED of each star depends on the interstellar…
Symmetry is ubiquitous throughout nature and can often give great insights into the formation, structure and stability of objects studied by mathematicians, physicists, chemists and biologists. However, perfect symmetry occurs rarely so…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
Recently, a new method to constrain the distance of blazars with unknown redshift using combined observations in the GeV and TeV regimes has been developed, with the underlying assumption that the Very High Energy (VHE) spectrum corrected…
Most of current cosmological theories are built combining an isotropic and homogeneous manifold with a scale factor that depends on time. If one supposes a hyperconical universe with linear expansion, an inhomogeneous metric can be obtained…
Solar twins are stars of key importance to the field of astronomy and offer a multitude of science applications. Only a small number ($\lesssim200$) of solar twins are known today, all of which are relatively close to our Sun…
The fortuitous occurrence of a type II-Plateau (IIP) supernova, SN 2014bc, in a galaxy for which distance estimates from a number of primary distance indicators are available provides a means with which to cross-calibrate the standardised…
With the launch and application of next-generation ground- and space-based telescopes, astronomy has entered the era of big data, necessitating more efficient and robust data analysis methods. Most traditional parameter estimation methods…
An improved version of the 3D stellar reddening map in a space with a radius of 1200 pc around the Sun and within 600 pc of the Galactic midplane is presented. As in the previous 2010 and 2012 versions of the map, photometry with an…
While luminosity distances from Type Ia supernovae (SNe) provide a powerful probe of cosmological parameters, the accuracy with which these distances can be measured is limited by cosmic magnification due to gravitational lensing by the…
We describe here a new full 2-D parameterization of the PSFs of the three XMM-Newton EPIC telescopes as a function of instrument, energy, off-axis angle and azimuthal angle, covering the whole field-of-view of the three EPIC detectors. It…