Related papers: How can we distinguish transient pulsars from SETI…
Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…
Astronomers occasionally detect an object having unexpected shape, unexplainable photometry, or unprecedented spectra that are inconsistent with our contemporary knowledge of the universe. Upon careful assessment, many of these anomalies…
The history of astronomical discovery shows that many of the most detectable phenomena, especially detection firsts, are not typical members of their broader class, but rather rare, extreme cases with disproportionately large observational…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a scientific endeavor which struggles with unique issues -- a strong indeterminacy in what data to look for and when to do so. This has led to attempts at finding both fundamental…
We argue that pulsars may be spin-polarized neutron stars, i.e. cosmic permanent magnets. This would simply explain several observational facts about pulsars, including the 'beacon effect' itself i.e. the static/stable misalignment of…
The brightest events in a time series of cosmological transients obey an observation time dependence which is often overlooked. This dependence can be exploited to probe the global properties of electromagnetic and gravitational wave…
Modern astrophysics is undergoing a revolution. As detector technology has advanced, and astronomers have been able to study the sky with finer temporal detail, a rich diversity of sources which vary on timescales from years down to a few…
Transient phenomena are interesting and potentially highly revealing of details about the processes under observation and study that could otherwise go unnoticed. It is therefore important to maximize the sensitivity of the method used to…
The unexpectedly high flux of cosmic ray positrons detected at Earth may originate from nearby astrophysical sources, dark matter, or unknown processes of cosmic-ray secondary production. We report the detection, using the HighAltitude…
Light refracted by the planet's atmosphere is usually ignored in analysis of planetary transits. Here we show that refraction can add shoulders to the transit light curve, i.e., an increase in the observed flux, mostly just before and after…
Nearly everything we know about extrasolar planets to date comes from optical astronomy. While exoplanetary aurorae are predicted to be bright at low radio frequencies (< 1 GHz), we consider the effect of an exoplanet transit on radio…
Recent observations by H.E.S.S. and MAGIC strongly suggest that the Universe is more transparent to very-high-energy gamma rays than previously thought. We show that this fact can be reconciled with standard blazar emission models provided…
The recently identified source class of pulsar halos may be populated and bright enough at TeV energies to constitute a large fraction of the sources that will be observed with the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), especially in the context…
Space photometry has revealed rich pulsation spectra in classical Be stars. Often frequency pairs can be found that differ by nearly the frequency of a third genuine stellar variability. The lowest currently known of these so-called…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
Several types of Galactic sources, like magnetars, microquasars, novae or pulsar wind nebulae flares, display transient emission in the X-ray band. Some of these sources have also shown emission at MeV--GeV energies. However, none of these…
The `radio sky' is relatively unexplored for transient signals, although the potential of radio-transient searches is high, as demonstrated recently by the discovery of a previously unknown type of source which varies on timescales of…
Recently, there have been reports of six bright, dispersed bursts of coherent radio emission found in pulsar surveys with the Parkes Multi-beam Receiver. Not much is known about the progenitors of these bursts, but they are…
We present a way of searching for non-transiting exoplanets with dusty tails. In the transiting case, the extinction by dust during the transit removes more light from the beam than is scattered into it. Thus, the forward scattering…
The understanding of pulsar radio emission demands a close look at all regions of the huge parameter space present for pulsar observations. In this review we concentrate on the space given by the range of observed pulse periods, spanning…