Related papers: Supernovae and Gaia
Over the past decade, supernovae have emerged as some of the most powerful tools for measuring extragalactic distances. A well developed physical understanding of type II supernovae allow them to be used to measure distances independent of…
Observations of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) reveal correlations between their luminosities and light-curve shapes, and between their spectral sequence and photometric sequence. Assuming SNe Ia do not evolve at different redshifts, the…
The first few hours of a supernova (SN) contain significant information about the progenitor system. The most modern wide-field surveys that scan the sky repeatedly every few days can discover all kinds of transients in those early epochs.…
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are the largest thermonuclear explosions in the Universe. Their light output can be seen across great distances and has led to the discovery that the expansion rate of the Universe is accelerating. Despite the…
Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) are the best standard candles known today. At high redshift ($z\sim1$) SNe Ia are used to determine the Cosmological Constant Lambda with great success. However the most serious concern is raised by thepossible…
We find that spectroscopically peculiar subluminous SNe Ia come from an old population. Of the sixteen subluminous SNe Ia known, ten are found in E/S0 galaxies, and the remainder are found in early-type spirals. The probability that this is…
A number of supernovae, classified as Type II, show remarkably peculiar properties such as an extremely low expansion velocity and an extraordinarily small amount of $^{56}$Ni in the ejecta. We present a joint analysis of the available…
A rare class of `super-luminous' supernovae that are about ten or more times more luminous at their peaks than other types of luminous supernovae has recently been found at low to intermediate redshifts. A small subset of these events have…
We show the preliminary results of our search for the progenitor systems of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). We model binary populations our aim being to compare these models with the observations of detailed element abundances of the hot…
Understanding and quantifying the contribution of known classes of transient and variable sources is an important lesson to be learned from the manifold of pre-cursors programs of the near-future large synoptic sky survey programs like…
Bright optical transients (i.e. transients typically visible with the naked eye) are populated mainly by novae eruptions plus a few supernovae (among which the SN1987a event). One bright nova happen every two years, either in the North ot…
SN 2011fe was the nearest and best-observed type Ia supernova in a generation, and brought previous incomplete datasets into sharp contrast with the detailed new data. In retrospect, documenting spectroscopic behaviors of type Ia supernovae…
Distant Type Ia and II supernovae (SNe) can serve as valuable probes of the history of the cosmic expansion and star formation, and provide important information on their progenitor models. At present, however, there are few observational…
In general, Light Echoes (LE) are beautiful, rather academical and therefore unavoidably useless phenomena. In some cases, however, they can give interesting information about the environment surrounding the exploding star. After giving a…
The nature of Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) progenitor systems and the mechanisms that lead up to their explosions are still widely debated. In rare cases the SN ejecta interact with circumstellar material (CSM) that was ejected from the…
Gravitationally lensed type Ia supernovae (glSNe Ia) are unique astronomical tools that can be used to study cosmological parameters, distributions of dark matter, the astrophysics of the supernovae, and the intervening lensing galaxies…
Stellar multiplicity is among the oldest and richest problems in astrophysics. Binary stars are a cornerstone of stellar mass and radius measurements that underpin modern stellar evolutionary models. Binaries are the progenitors of many of…
Scope of this contribution is twofold. First, it describes the potential of the global astrometry mission Gaia for detecting and measuring planetary systems based on detailed double-blind mode simulations and on the most recent predictions…
A type Ia supernova (SN Ia), one of the two main classes of exploding stars, is recognized by the absence of hydrogen and the presence of elements such as silicon and sulphur in its spectra. These explosions are thought to produce the…
Of the 350 or more known Galactic classical novae, only a handful of them, the recurrent novae, have been observed in outburst more than once. At least eight of these recurrents are known to harbour evolved secondary stars, rather than the…