Related papers: How achromatic is the stellar scintillation on lar…
For the Eddington mission, the intrinsic stellar variability can be a major source of noise in the detection of extrasolar planets by the transit method. We derive that most detections of terrestrial planets (1-2 R_Earth) will occur around…
The purpose of this letter is to compare the quality of different methods for estimating stellar masses of galaxies. We compare the results of (a) fitting stellar population synthesis models to broad band colors from SDSS and 2MASS, (b) the…
The time delay between the arrival of photons of multiple images of time variable sources can be used to constrain absolute distances in the Universe (Refsdal 1964), and in turn obtain a direct estimate of the Hubble constant and other…
The space-time correlations of streams of photons can provide fundamentally new channels of information about the Universe. Today's astronomical observations essentially measure certain amplitude coherence functions produced by a source.…
The study of fundamental properties (such as temperatures, radii, masses, and ages) and interior processes (such as convection and angular momentum transport) of stars has implications on various topics in astrophysics, ranging from the…
The clumping of massive star winds is an established paradigm, which is confirmed by multiple lines of evidence and is supported by stellar wind theory. We use the results from time-dependent hydrodynamical models of the instability in the…
In the evaluation of novel scintillators, it is important to ensure that the spectrum of the light emitted by the scintillator is well matched to the response of the photomultiplier. In attempting to measure this spectrum using radioactive…
Unavoidable variations in size and position of the building blocks of photonic crystals cause light scattering and extinction of coherent beams. We present a new model for both 2 and 3-dimensional photonic crystals that relates the…
Visibility scintillation resulting from wave propagation through the turbulent ionosphere can be an important sources of noise at low radio frequencies ($\nu\lesssim 200$ MHz). Many low frequency experiments are underway to detect the power…
Galaxy color gradients - i.e., spectral energy distributions that vary across the galaxy profile - will impact galaxy shape measurements when the modeled point spread function (PSF) corresponds to that for a galaxy with spatially uniform…
Conventional ground-based astronomical observations suffer from image distortion due to atmospheric turbulence. This can be minimized by choosing suitable geographic locations or adaptive optical techniques, and avoided altogether by using…
The properties and the evolution of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are strongly influenced by their mass loss through a stellar wind. This is believed to be caused by radiation pressure due to the absorption and scattering of the…
A long-held astronomical vision is to realize diffraction-limited optical aperture synthesis over kilometer baselines. This will enable imaging of stellar surfaces and their environments, show their evolution over time, and reveal…
This paper deals with the effect of errors in the B and V magnitudes, or measurements in any other color system, on the width of the main sequence in a color-magnitude (Hertzsprung-Russell) diagram. The width is defined as the dispersion in…
The speckle imaging is a photographic technique that resolves objects viewed through severely distorted media. The results are insensitive to the errors caused by apparent size of the isoplanatic patch and the telescope aberrations. In this…
We present a means of characterizing and removing internal reflections between the CCD and other optical surfaces in an astronomical camera. The stellar reflections appear as out-of-focus images and are not necessarily axisymmetric about…
The last decade has seen a rapid development in asteroseismology thanks to the CoRoT and Kepler missions. With more detailed asteroseismic observations available, it is becoming possible to infer exactly how oscillations are driven and…
A photon of wavelength lambda ~1 micron interacting with a dust grain of radius a_p ~ 1 mm (a "pebble") undergoes scattering in the forward direction, largely within a small characteristic diffraction angle theta_s ~ lambda/a_p ~ 100".…
It is proposed to search for scintillation of extragalactic sources through the last unknown baryonic structures. Appropriate observation of the scintillation process described here should allow one to detect column density stochastic…
Starlight from distant galaxies ($z > 3$) is redshifted into the near infrared band with observed wavelengths from 2-8 $\mu$m. Most of the light is emitted by stars that have a peak emission at the 1.6 $\mu$m wavelength of the minimum of…