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The growing rate of increase in the number of the discovered extra-solar planets which has consequently raised the enthusiasm to explore the universe in hope of finding earth-like planets has resulted in the wide use of Gravitational…
We present a new method to estimate the Hubble constant H_0 from the measured time delays in quadruply imaged gravitational lens systems. We show how it is possible to get an estimate of H_0 without the need to completely reconstruct the…
Thirteen exo-planets have been discovered using the gravitational microlensing technique (out of which 7 have been published). These planets already demonstrate that super-Earths (with mass up to ~10 Earth masses) beyond the snow line are…
Dimensionality reduction can be applied to hyperspectral images so that the most useful data can be extracted and processed more quickly. This is critical in any situation in which data volume exceeds the capacity of the computational…
We summarize the status of a computer simulator for microlens planet surveys. The simulator generates synthetic light curves of microlensing events observed with specified networks of telescopes over specified periods of time. Particular…
As next-generation imaging instruments and interferometers search for planets closer to their stars, they must contend with increasing orbital motion and longer integration times. These compounding effects make it difficult to detect faint…
Long baseline interferometry of microlensing events can resolve the individual images of the source produced by the lens, which combined with the modelling of the microlensing light curve, leads to the exact lens mass and distance.…
We present here a new algorithm for the fast computation of N-point correlation functions in large astronomical data sets. The algorithm is based on kdtrees which are decorated with cached sufficient statistics thus allowing for orders of…
We present a simple and efficient acceleration technique for an arbitrary method for computing the Euclidean projection of a point onto a convex polytope, defined as the convex hull of a finite number of points, in the case when the number…
To date, the most precise measurement of the observer's peculiar velocity comes from the dipole in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This velocity also generates a dipole in the source number counts, whose amplitude is governed not…
Galaxy clusters can act as gravitational lenses to magnify the universe behind them, allowing us to see deep into the early universe. The Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields program (Lotz et al. 2017) uses six galaxy clusters imaged by…
I present here a review of past and present multi-disciplinary research of the Pittsburgh Computational AstroStatistics (PiCA) group. This group is dedicated to developing fast and efficient statistical algorithms for analysing huge…
Microlensing of extragalactic sources, in particular the probability of significant amplifications, is a potentially powerful probe of the abundance of compact objects outside the halo of the Milky Way. Accurate experimental constraints…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
Cosmological measurements require the calculation of nontrivial quantities over large datasets. The next generation of survey telescopes (such as DES, PanSTARRS, and LSST) will yield measurements of billions of galaxies. The scale of these…
[Abridged] We present the results of a highly parallel Kepler equation solver using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) on a commercial nVidia GeForce 280GTX and the "Compute Unified Device Architecture" programming environment. We apply…
Time-resolved photometry is an important new probe of the physics of condensate clouds in extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs. Extreme adaptive optics systems can directly image planets, but precise brightness measurements are challenging.…
Most of the calculations in standard sphere decoders are redundant, in the sense that they either calculate quantities that are never used or calculate some quantities more than once. A new method, which is applicable to lattices as well as…
The performance of numerical micromagnetic models is limited by the demagnetizing field computation, which typically accounts for the majority of the computation time. For magnetization dynamics simulations explicit evaluation methods are…
Radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial amounts of large telescope time in order to monitor a sufficient number of stars. Two of the aspects which can limit such surveys are the single-object…