Related papers: Two Peculiar Fast Transients in a Strongly Lensed …

If the Universe has a significant baryonic dark component in the form of compact objects in galaxy halos (machos), then there is a minute chance (about $10^{-7}$) that one of the Galactic machos passes sufficiently close to our line of…

We present an analysis of the evolution of galaxy clustering in the redshift interval 0<z<4.5 in the HDF-S. The HST optical data are combined with infrared ISAAC/VLT observations, and photometric redshifts are used for all the galaxies…

The last ten years have opened up a new parameter space in time-domain astronomy with the discovery of transients defying our understanding of how stars explode. These extremes of the transient paradigm represent the brightest - called…

Recent observations of lensed galaxies at cosmological distances have detected individual stars that are extremely magnified when crossing the caustics of lensing clusters. In idealized cluster lenses with smooth mass distributions, two…

We report on continued monitoring observations of the Galactic center carried out by the X-ray telescope aboard the Swift satellite in 2008 and 2009. This campaign revealed activity of the five known X-ray transients AX J1745.6-2901, CXOGC…

[Abridged] We present a search for fast optical transients (~0.5 hr-1 day) using repeated observations of the Pan-STARRS1 Medium-Deep Survey (PS1/MDS) fields. Our search takes advantage of the consecutive g/r-band observations (16.5 min in…

Two cold, gas giant planets orbiting a G-type main sequence star in the galactic disk have previously been discovered in the high magnification microlensing event OGLE-2012-BLG-0026 (Han et al. 2013). Here we present revised host star flux…

We show that the spectrum of the unusual transient SCP06F6 is consistent with emission from a cool, optically thick and carbon-rich atmosphere if the transient is located at a redshift of z~0.14. The implied extragalactic nature of the…

We present new elements in the identification of the lens-system producing the 4 images of the BAL quasar H1413+117, based on the recent HST/NICMOS-2/F160W observations. After a careful PSF subtraction of the 4 images of the quasar, the…

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) automatically targeted as a quasar candidate the recently discovered, gravitationally lensed, extremely reddened z=2.2 quasar PMN J0134-0931. The SDSS spectrum exhibits Ca II absorption at z=0.76451,…

We present a new parametric strong lensing analysis of the galaxy cluster MACS J0138.0-2155 at z = 0.336, the first known to show two multiply-imaged supernova (SN) siblings, SN Requiem and SN Encore at z= 1.949. We exploit HST and JWST…

The bright, blue, rapidly evolving AT2018cow is a well-studied peculiar extragalactic transient. Despite an abundance of multi-wavelength data, there still is no consensus on the nature of the event. We present our analysis of three epochs…

We report the characterization of a massive (m_p=3.9 +- 1.4 M_jup) microlensing planet (OGLE-2015-BLG-0954Lb) orbiting an M dwarf host (M=0.33 +- 0.12 M_sun) at a distance toward the Galactic bulge of 0.6 (+0.4,-0.2) kpc, which is extremely…

First, we review the current status of the detection of strong `external' variability in the CLASS gravitational B1600+434, focusing on the 1998 VLA 8.5-GHz and 1998/9 WSRT multi-frequency observations. We show that this data can best be…

We present Keck II NIRSPEC rest-frame optical spectra for three recently discovered lensed galaxies: the Cosmic Horseshoe (z = 2.38), the Clone (z = 2.00), and SDSS J090122.37+181432.3 (z = 2.26). The boost in signal-to-noise ratio (S/N)…

The census of massive clusters of galaxies in the local Universe is almost complete, thanks to their prominent observational signatures at X-ray, optical, and sub-mm wavelengths. Nevertheless, a number of such systems are likely to be…

A nova is a cataclysmic event on the surface of a white dwarf in a binary system that increases the overall brightness by several orders of magnitude. Although binary systems with a white dwarf are expected to be overabundant in globular…

We present an improved determination of the total mass distribution of three CLASH/HFF massive clusters, MACS J1206.2-0847 (z=0.44), MACS J0416.1-2403 (z=0.40), Abell S1063 (z=0.35). We specifically reconstruct the sub-halo mass component…

We present the Palomar Transient Factory discoveries and the photometric and spectroscopic observations of PTF11kmb and PTF12bho. We show that both transients have properties consistent with the class of calcium-rich gap transients,…

We present an analysis of the properties of the lensing cluster MS0440+0204 at z=0.1965. MS0440+0204 has been observed with a variety of telescopes at diverse wavelengths: from the ground with CFHT, MMT and KECK and from Earth orbit with…