Related papers: Analysing surveys of our Galaxy I: basic astrometr…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
Nowadays, as the quantity of data to process began to rise, so did the need for a method to discern what pieces of information could be useful for the user; in response, researchers focused their efforts on improving the already existing…
Equilibrium dynamical models are essential tools for extracting science from surveys of our Galaxy. We show how models can be tested with data from a survey before the survey's selection function has been determined. We illustrate the…
Stellar clusters are important for astrophysics in many ways, for instance as optimal tracers of the Galactic populations to which they belong or as one of the best test bench for stellar evolutionary models. Gaia DR1, with TGAS, is just…
Many approaches to galaxy dynamics assume that the gravitational potential is simple and the distribution function is time-invariant. Under these assumptions there are traditional tools for inferring potential parameters given observations…
This paper describes a series of activities in which students investigate and use the Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonic models of planetary motion. The activities guide students through using open source software to discover important…
We present a new method for dealing with geometrical selection effects in galaxy surveys while using a multifractal framework. The power of multifractal analysis lies in its connection to higher order moments, in that it not only probes…
The amount of collected data in many scientific fields is increasing, all of them requiring a common task: extract knowledge from massive, multi parametric data sets, as rapidly and efficiently possible. This is especially true in astronomy…
Astronomy has a long history of acquiring, systematizing, and interpreting large quantities of data. Starting from the earliest sky atlases through the first major photographic sky surveys of the 20th century, this tradition is continuing…
Numerical simulations play a key important role in modern cosmology. Examples are plenty including the cosmic web - large scale structure of the distribution of galaxies in space - which was first observed in N-body simulations and later…
Modern galaxy surveys focus on the galaxy power spectrum or 2-point correlation function to test and constrain cosmological models. Additional information comes from higher-order N-point functions, but their analysis is challenging. A…
Low redshift surveys of galaxy peculiar velocities provide a wealth of cosmological information. We revisit the idea of extracting this information by directly measuring the redshift-space momentum power spectrum from such surveys. We…
We present an analytic model of the stellar mass distribution of the Milky Way bar. The model is obtained by fitting a multi-component parametric density distribution to a made-to-measure N-body model of Portail et al., constructed to match…
Significant advances in the discovery and characterization of the planetary systems of nearby stars can be accomplished with a moderate aperture high performance coronagraphic space mission that could be started in the next decade. Its…
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
The next decade will be an exciting period for solar astrophysics, as new ground- and space-based instrumentation will provide unprecedented observations of the solar atmosphere and heliosphere. The synergy between modeling effort and…
We shall discuss cosmological models in extended theories of gravitation. We shall define a surface, called the model surface, in the space of observable parameters which characterises families of theories. We also show how this surface can…
I review galaxy number count models and present ncmod, an extendable and general purpose model for comparing and interpreting the results of field galaxy survey data. I develop techniques and software for converting the results of a survey…
Surveys of galaxy clusters provide a promising method of testing models of structure formation in the universe. Within the context of our standard structure formation scenario, surveys provide measurements of the geometry of the universe…
A large fraction of the information collected by cosmological surveys is simply discarded to avoid lengthscales which are difficult to model theoretically. We introduce a new technique which enables the extraction of useful information from…