Related papers: A Shiny New Method for SETI: Specular Reflections …
It has been posited that lunar eclipse observations may help predict the in-transit signature of Earth-like extrasolar planets. However, a comparative analysis of the two phenomena addressing in detail the transport of stellar light through…
Stars twinkle because their light propagates through the atmosphere. The same phenomenon is expected when the light of remote stars crosses a Galactic - disk or halo - refractive medium such as a molecular cloud. We present the promising…
The Panoramic SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) experiment (PANOSETI) aims to detect and quantify optical transients from nanosecond to second precision over a large field-of-view ($\sim$4,450 square-degrees). To meet these…
Existing and planned optical telescopes and surveys can detect artificially-illuminated objects comparable in total brightness to a major terrestrial city out to the outskirts of the Solar System. Orbital parameters of Kuiper belt objects…
The Spectrograph of the RISTRETTO instrument is now currently being manufactured. RISTETTO is an instrument designed to detect and characterize the reflected light of nearby exoplanets. It combines high contrast imaging and high resolution…
Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the structure of matter on a broad range of astronomical scales, and as light from a distant source traverses an intervening galaxy, compact matter such as planets, stars, and black holes act as…
We calculate simulated images of disks perturbed by embedded small planets. These 10-50 M_Earth bodies represent the growing cores of giant planets. We examine scattered light and thermal emission from these disks over a range of…
Gravitational microlensing occurs when a foreground star happens to pass very close to our line of sight to a more distant background star. The foreground star acts as a lens, splitting the light from the source star into two images, which…
Extra-solar planets can be efficiently detected in gravitational microlensing events of high magnification. High accuracy photometry is required over a short, well-defined time interval only, of order 10-30 hours. Most planets orbiting the…
The main purpose of this article is to make Astronomers aware that Searches for Extraterrestrial Intelligence can be carried out by analyzing standard astronomical spectra, including those they already have taken. Simplicity is the…
Distant starlight passing through the Earth's atmosphere is refracted by an angle of just over one degree near the surface. This focuses light onto a focal line starting at an inner (and chromatic) boundary out to infinity - offering an…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
The next generation of high-contrast imaging instruments will provide the first unresolved image of an extrasolar planet. While the emitted infrared light from the planet in thermal equilibrium should show almost no phase effect, the…
Surveys for gravitational lens systems have typically found a significantly larger fraction of lenses with four (or more) images than are predicted by standard ellipsoidal lens models (50% versus 25-30%). We show that including the effects…
Context. High accuracy astrometric instruments like Gaia aiming at an accuracy of 1 microarcsecond cannot be considered as point-like observers in the framework of relativistic modelling of observable quantities. Aims. Special-relativistic…
Recently Jiang et al. reported the discovery of a possible short duration transient, detected in a single image, spatially associated with a z~11 galaxy. Jiang et al. and Kahn et al. suggested the transient originates from a Gamma-Ray Burst…
In recent years, gravitational lensing has been used as a means to detect substructure in galaxy-sized halos, via anomalous flux ratios in quadruply-imaged lenses. In addition to causing anomalous flux ratios, substructure may also perturb…
Statistical characterization of secondary subsystems in binaries helps to distinguish between various scenarios of multiple-star formation. The DSSI speckle instrument was used at the Gemini-N telescope for several hours in 2015 July to…
Stars twinkle because their light propagates through the atmosphere. The same phenomenon is expected when the light of remote stars crosses a Galactic - disk or halo - refractive medium such as a molecular cloud.We present the promising…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…