Related papers: Detection of Stars within $\sim$0.8 arcseconds of …
The Kepler K2 mission now makes it possible to find and study a wider variety of eclipsing binary stars than has been possible to-date, particularly long-period systems with narrow eclipses. Our aim is to characterise eclipsing binary stars…
We present results of the CFHT adaptive optics search for companions of a homogeneous group of contact binary stars, as a contribution to our attempts to prove a hypothesis that these binaries require a third star to become so close as…
The Kepler planet sample can only be used to reconstruct the underlying planet occurrence rate if the detection efficiency of the Kepler pipeline is known, here we present the results of a second experiment aimed at characterising this…
We present a Bayesian-odds-ratio-based algorithm for detecting stellar flares in light curve data. We assume flares are described by a model in which there is a rapid rise with a half-Gaussian profile, followed by an exponential decay. Our…
Hundreds of candidate hybrid pulsators of intermediate type A-F were revealed by the recent space missions. Hybrid pulsators allow to study the full stellar interiors, where p- and g-modes are simultaneously excited. The true hybrid stars…
We have conducted an angular differential imaging survey with NIRC2 at Keck in search of close-in substellar companions to a sample of seven systems with confirmed planetary-mass companions (PMCs) on wide orbits (>50 AU). These…
To understand the influence of additional wide stellar companions on planet formation, it is necessary to determine the fraction of multiple stellar systems amongst the known extrasolar planet population. We target recently discovered…
O- and B-type stars are often found in binary systems, but the low binary mass-ratio regime is relatively unexplored due to observational difficulties. Binary systems with low mass-ratios may have formed through fragmentation of the…
In an effort to better understand the details of the stellar structure and evolution of metal poor stars, the Gemini North telescope was used on two occasions to take speckle imaging data of a sample of known spectroscopic binary stars and…
We investigate the distribution of companion galaxies around quasars using {\em Hubble Space Telescope} ({\em HST}) Advanced Camera for Surveys Wide Field Camera (ACS/WFC) archival images. Our master sample contains 532 quasars which have…
(abridged) Context. Wide binaries are a potential pathway for the formation of hot Jupiters. The binary fraction among host stars is an important discriminator between competing formation theories, but has not been well characterised.…
Many problems in contemporary astrophysics---from understanding the formation of black holes to untangling the chemical evolution of galaxies---rely on knowledge about binary stars. This, in turn, depends on discovery and characterization…
While the Kepler Mission was designed to look at tens of thousands of faint stars (V > 12), brighter stars that saturated the detector are important because they can be and have been observed very accurately by other instruments. By…
Binary stars can inflate the observed velocity dispersion of stars in dark matter dominated systems such as ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs). However, the population of binaries in UFDs is poorly constrained by observations, with preferred…
Of the over 450 exoplanets known to date, more than 420 of them have been discovered using radial velocity studies, a method that tells nothing about the inclination of the planet's orbit. Because it is more likely that the companion is a…
The Kepler space telescope has proven to be a gold mine for the study of variable stars. Unfortunately, Kepler only returns a handful of pixels surrounding each star on the target list, which omits a large number of stars in the Kepler…
28 hitherto neglected candidates for the Catalogue of Nearby Stars (CNS) were investigated to verify their classification and to improve their distance estimates. All targets had at least a preliminary status of being nearby dwarf stars…
Kepler and K2 data analysis reported in the literature is mostly based on aperture photometry. Because of Kepler's large, undersampled pixels and the presence of nearby sources, aperture photometry is not always the ideal way to obtain…
Keck/LRIS multi-object spectroscopy has been carried out on 140 of some of the lowest and highest surface brightness faint (19 < R < 22) dwarf galaxy candidates in the core region of the Coma Cluster. These spectra are used to measure…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…