Related papers: Keepers of the Double Stars
In an era where astronomical data is expanding at an unprecedented rate, the importance of data sharing and accessibility among astronomy archives cannot be overstated. Since the 1990s, an international partnership between the Space…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scheduled for launch in 2014, is expected to revolutionize our understanding of the high-redshift Universe. Even so, many of the most interesting sources that may be hiding at redshifts z~10…
Kepler's first major discoveries are two hot objects orbiting stars in its field. These may be the cores of stars that have each been eroded or disrupted by a companion star. The companion, which is the star monitored today, is likely to…
An increasing amount of spectroscopic and photometric evidence is showing that the stellar populations of globular clusters are not as simple as they have been considered for many years. The presence of at least two different populations of…
Tycho Brahe completed his catalogue with the positions and magnitudes of 1004 fixed stars in 1598. This catalogue circulated in manuscript form. Brahe edited a shorter version with 777 stars, printed in 1602, and Kepler edited the full…
A long-term project, aiming at systematic search for variable stars in Galactic Open Clusters, was started at the Geneva Observatory in 2002. We have been observing regularly a sample of twenty-seven Galactic Open Clusters in the U, B, V…
As part of an ongoing collaboration between student groups at high schools and professional astronomers, we have searched for the presence of circum-binary planets in a bona-fide unbiased sample of twelve post-common envelope binaries…
Several planet-search groups have acquired a great deal of data in the form of time-series spectra of several hundred nearby stars with time baselines of over a decade. While binary star detections are generally not the goal of these…
The precise radial velocity survey at Keck Observatory began over 20 years ago. Its survey of thousands of stars now has the time baseline to be sensitive to planets with decade-long orbits, including Jupiter analogs. I present several…
Large-scale spiral arms have been revealed in scattered light images of a few protoplanetary disks. Theoretical models suggest that such arms may be driven by and co-rotate with giant planets, which has called for remarkable observational…
Extrasolar circumbinary planets are so called because they orbit two stars instead of just one; to date, an increasing number of such planets have been discovered with a variety of techniques. If the orbital frequency of the hosting stellar…
With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back to 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems. Because of the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the…
Stellar photometry obtained using the Hubble Space Telescope is used to study the distributions of the number densities of stars of various ages in 12 irregular and dwarf spiral galaxies viewed edge-on. Two subsystems can be distinguished…
The formation of massive stars is one of the major unsolved problems in stellar astrophysics. However, only few if any of these are found as single stars, on average massive stars have more than one companion. Many of them are born in dense…
Henry Norris Russell, one of the most influential American astronomers of the first half of the 20th Century, had a special place in his heart for the Lowell Observatory. Although privately critical of the founder for his pronouncements…
The Master Catalogue of stars towards the Magellanic Clouds (MC2) is a multi-wavelength reference catalogue. The current paper presents the first results of the MC2 project. We started with a massive cross-identification of the two recently…
The discovery of the interstellar medium and the early work of Lyman Spitzer, Jr. are reviewed here in the context of the remarkable observation in the early 1950's that star formation continues in the present age. Prior to this…
Compact objects observed in gravitational-wave astronomy so far always come in pairs and never individually. Identifying the two components of a binary system is a delicate operation that is often taken for granted. The labeling procedure…
It is surprising to find dust around B type stars, as in the case of B[e] stars. These stars exhibit a dense, dusty environment witnessed by their infrared-excess and many emission lines from permitted and forbidden transitions. Given the…
When V. M. Slipher gave the 1933 George Darwin lecture to the Royal Astronomical Society, it was natural that he spoke on spectrographic studies of planets. Less than one-sixth of his published work deals with globular clusters and the…