Related papers: Pushing the precision limit of ground-based eclips…
Astrometry - the precise measurement of celestial positions and motions - is entering the micro-arcsecond ($\mu$as) era at multiple wavelengths, enabling new insights on compact objects across all mass scales. Here we review how…
Most models used to predict or fit exoplanet transmission spectra do not include all the effects of atmospheric refraction. Namely, the angular size of the star with respect to the planet can limit the lowest altitude, or highest density…
A significant and growing portion of systematic error on a number of fundamental parameters in astrophysics and cosmology is due to uncertainties from absolute photometric and flux standards. A path toward achieving major reduction in such…
Astrometric detection and mass determination of Earth-mass exoplanets requires sub-microarcsec accuracy, which is theoretically possible with an imaging space telescope using field stars as an astrometric reference. The measurement must…
In long adaptive optics corrected exposures, exoplanet detections are currently limited by speckle noise originating from the telescope and instrument optics, and it is expected that such noise will also limit future high-contrast imaging…
The EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph (EXPRES) is a new Doppler spectrograph designed to reach a radial velocity measurement precision sufficient to detect Earth-like exoplanets orbiting nearby, bright stars. We report on extensive laboratory…
We present a method to measure the small-scale matter power spectrum using high-resolution measurements of the gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). To determine whether small-scale structure today is suppressed on…
Ground-based observations of exoplanet eclipses provide important clues to the planets' atmospheric physics, yet systematics in light curve analyses are not fully understood. It is unknown if measurements suggesting near-infrared flux…
Scintillation noise is a major limitation of ground base photometric precision. An extensive dataset of stellar scintillation collected at 11 astronomical sites world-wide with MASS instruments was used to estimate the scintillation noise…
In ultra-fast astronomical observations featuring fast transients on sub-$\mu$s time scales, the conventional Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) threshold, often fixed at $5\sigma$, becomes inadequate as observational window timescales shorten,…
To achieve the sensitivity required to detect signals from neutral hydrogen from the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionisation it is critical to have a well-calibrated instrument which has a stable calibration over the course of the…
In this paper, we present a novel approach to the estimation of strongly varying backgrounds in astronomical images by means of small objects removal and subsequent missing pixels interpolation. The method is based on the analysis of a…
When observing the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets using high-resolution spectroscopy, one aims to detect well-resolved spectral features with high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) as is possible today with modern spectrographs. However,…
The 'holy grail' of exoplanet research today is the detection of an earth-like planet: a rocky planet in the habitable zone around a main-sequence star. Extremely precise Doppler spectroscopy is an indispensable tool to find and…
In this paper we use the Cramer-Rao lower uncertainty bound to estimate the maximum precision that could be achieved on the joint simultaneous (or 2D) estimation of photometry and astrometry of a point source measured by a linear CCD…
Accurate measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy requires precise knowledge of the instrument beam. We explore how well the Planck beams will be determined from observations of planets, developing techniques that are…
Time-series photometry at mid-infrared wavelengths is becoming a common technique to search for atmospheres around rocky exoplanets. This method constrains the brightness temperature of the planet to determine whether heat redistribution is…
A measurement by microlensing of the planetary mass function of planets with masses ranging from 5M_E to 10M_J and orbital radii from 0.5 to 10 AU was reported recently. A strategy for extending the mass range down to (1-3)M_E is proposed…
The ultra-precise photometric space satellite MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) will provide the first opportunity to measure the albedos and scattered light curves from known short-period extrasolar planets. Due to the…
Precision photometric calibration is key to a number of astrophysical research areas such as supernova cosmology and dark energy studies. In the age of large surveys, pushing the limits of photometry is a worthy challenge, with traditional…