Related papers: Autonomous software: Myth or magic?
The Angstrom Project is undertaking an optical survey of stellar microlensing events across the bulge region of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) using a distributed network of two-meter class telescopes. The Angstrom Project Alert System (APAS)…
Electronically Assisted Astronomy consists in capturing deep sky images with a digital camera coupled to a telescope to display views of celestial objects that would have been invisible through direct observation. This practice generates a…
Microlensing can be used to discover exoplanets of a wide range of masses with orbits beyond ~ 1 AU, and even free-floating planets. The WFIRST mission will use microlensing to discover approximately 1600 planets by monitoring ~100 million…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
We propose and evaluate the feasibility of a new strategy to search for planets via microlensing. This new strategy is designed to detect planets in "wide" orbits, i.e., with orbital separation, $a$ greater than $\sim 1.5 R_E$. Planets in…
Short duration lensing events tend to be generated by low-mass lenses or by lenses with high transverse velocities. Furthermore, for any given lens mass and speed, events of short duration are preferentially caused by nearby lenses…
The rapidly increasing volume of asteroseismic observations on solar-type stars has revealed a need for automated analysis tools. The reason for this is not only that individual analyses of single stars are rather time consuming, but more…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
Four planets have recently been discovered by gravitational microlensing. The most recent of these discoveries is the lowest-mass planet known to exist around a normal star. The detection of planets in gravitational microlensing events was…
For all exoplanet candidates, the reliability of a claimed detection needs to be assessed through a careful study of systematic errors in the data to minimize the false positives rate. We present a method to investigate such systematics in…
Spectro Capture is a Python-based software system developed to automate small- observatory fibre-fed spectroscopy. The system integrates target selection, telescope slewing, guide star acquisition, fibre position restoration, calibration…
Software systems are increasingly used in application domains characterised by uncertain environments, evolving requirements and unexpected failures; sudden system malfunctioning raises serious issues of security, safety, loss of comfort or…
Observational astronomy has changed drastically in the last decade: manually driven target-by-target instruments have been replaced by fully automated robotic telescopes. Data acquisition methods have advanced to the point that terabytes of…
An extrasolar planet can be detected via microlensing from the perturbation it makes in the smooth lensing light curve of the primary. In addition to the conventional photometric microlensing, astrometric observation of the center-of-light…
We describe the application of data mining algorithms to research problems in astronomy. We posit that data mining has always been fundamental to astronomical research, since data mining is the basis of evidence-based discovery, including…
We present a novel method for anomaly detection in Solar System object data, in preparation for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. We train a deep autoencoder for anomaly detection and use the learned latent space to search for other…
Microlensing has recently proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Neptune- to super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…
The review and analysis of large collections of documents and the periodic monitoring of new additions thereto has greatly benefited from new developments in computer software. This paper demonstrates how using random vectors to construct a…
The WFIRST microlensing mission will measure precise light curves and relative parallaxes for millions of stars, giving it the potential to characterize short-period transiting planets all along the line of sight and into the galactic…