Related papers: Music and Astronomy
The historical detection of gravitational waves from the binary neutron star merger GW170817 is providing fundamental new insights into the astrophysical site for the creation of the heaviest elements in the cosmos and on the equation of…
Observations of radio loud active galaxies in the XMM-Newton archive by Mehdipour & Costantini show a strong anti-correlation between the column density of the ionized wind and the radio loudness parameter, providing evidence that jets may…
Recently, brown dwarfs have emerged as a new topic for the astrophysical studies. These objects are intermediate between solar-type stars and giant gaseous planets. In this article, the analogies between brown dwarfs and the planet Jupiter…
It has been proposed that magnetic activity could be enhanced due to interactions between close-in massive planets and their host stars. In this article, I present a brief overview of the connection between stellar magnetic activity and…
A white noise signal can access any possible configuration of values, though statistically over many samples tends to a uniform spectral distribution, and is highly unlikely to produce intelligible sound. But how unlikely? The probability…
It is well known that alternative theories to the Standard Model allow -- and sometimes require -- fundamental constants, such as the fine-structure constant, $\alpha$, to vary in spacetime. We demonstrate that one way to investigate these…
In the last decade a new generation of telescopes and sensors has allowed the production of a very large amount of data and astronomy has become, a data-rich science; this transition is often labeled as: "data revolution" and "data…
Tidal disruption and subsequent accretion of planetesimals by white dwarfs can reveal the elemental abundances of rocky bodies in exoplanetary systems. Those abundances provide information on the composition of the nebula from which the…
We are pleased to present a Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy in this issue of the The Annals of Applied Statistics. Astronomy is an observational rather than experimental science; as a result, astronomical data sets both small…
Detecting a stochastic gravitational wave background requires that we first understand and model any astrophysical foregrounds. In the millihertz frequency band, the predominate foreground signal will be from unresolved white dwarf binaries…
The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) has led to a deeper understanding of binaries of ordinary astrophysical objects, including neutron stars and black holes. In this work, we point out that binary systems may also exist in a dark…
The discovery of the first methane brown dwarf provides a framework for describing the important advances in both fundamental physics and astrophysics that are due to the study of companions of stars. I present a few highlights of the…
The masses of compact objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes are fundamental to astrophysics, but very difficult to measure. We present the results of an analysis of subluminous B (sdB) stars in close binary systems with…
The sequence of pitches which form a musical melody can be transposed or inverted. Since the 1970s, music theorists have modeled musical transposition and inversion in terms of an action of the dihedral group of order 24. More recently…
We study the possibility of orbital synchronization capture for a hierarchical quadrupole stellar system composed by two binaries emitting gravitational waves. Based on a simple model including the mass transfer for white dwarf binaries, we…
Symbiotic binary stars typically consist of a white dwarf (WD) that accretes material from the wind of a companion red giant. Orbital periods for these binaries are on the order of years, and their relatively small optical outbursts tend to…
Stellar variability studies are now reaching a completely new level thanks to ESA's Gaia mission, which enables us to locate many variable stars in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and determine the various instability strips/bands.…
A self-consistent statistical approach to the problem of planetary and stellar magnetism is suggested. The mechanism of magnetic field generation in the astronomical objects, where the existence of fields is associated with the axial…
We make some general observations about partial orders on quotient spaces, and explore their use in music theory, in two different contexts. In the first, we show that many of the most familiar chord and scale types in Western music appear…
X-ray binaries are binary star systems in which a compact object (a neutron star or a black hole) and a relatively normal star orbit a common centre of mass. Since the discovery of X-ray binaries with the first X-ray telescopes in the…