Related papers: The Dwarf Planet Makemake as seen by X-Shooter
The cubic kilometer IceCube neutrino telescope now operating at the South Pole in a near complete configuration observes the neutrino sky with an unprecedented sensitivity to galactic and extra-galactic cosmic ray accelerators. Within the…
Precision infrared photometry from Spitzer has enabled the first direct studies of light from extrasolar planets, via observations at secondary eclipse in transiting systems. Current Spitzer results include the first longitudinal…
We report new spectroscopic results, obtained with UKIRT/CGS4, of a sample of 14 candidate ultracool dwarfs selected from the DENIS (Deep Near-Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky) database. A further object, selected from the 2MASS Second…
The recently discovered brown dwarf WISE 0855 presents our first opportunity to directly study an object outside the Solar System that is nearly as cold as our own gas giant planets. However the traditional methodology for characterizing…
Observations from near the Eureka station on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic at 80 degrees North, benefit from 24-hour darkness combined with dark skies and long cloud-free periods during the winter. Our first astronomical…
The EXTraS project (Exploring the X-ray Transient and variable Sky) will characterise the temporal behaviour of the largest ever sample of objects in the soft X-ray range (0.1-12 keV) with a complex, systematic and consistent analysis of…
We perform an in-depth analysis of the recently validated TOI-3884 system, an M4 dwarf star with a transiting super-Neptune. Using high precision light curves obtained with the 3.5 m Apache Point Observatory and radial velocity observations…
We report the first extrasolar planet observations from the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), currently the world's largest, fully steerable, single-aperture optical telescope. We used the OSIRIS tunable filter imager on the GTC to…
Dark matter is one of the main goals of neutrino astronomy. At present, there are two big neutrino telescopes based on the Cherenkov technique in ice and water: IceCube at the South Pole and ANTARES in the northern hemisphere. Both…
Extremely large telescopes (ELTs) present an unparalleled opportunity to study the magnetism, atmospheric dynamics, and chemistry of very low mass stars (VLMs), brown dwarfs, and exoplanets. Instruments such as the Giant Magellan Telescope…
The detectability of planetesimal impacts on imaged exoplanets can be measured using Jupiter during the 1994 comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 events as a proxy. By integrating the whole planet flux with and without impact spots, the effect of the…
This overview article describes the legacy prospect and discovery potential of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) beyond cosmological studies, illustrating it with examples from the DES early data. DES is using a wide-field camera (DECam) on the…
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the 4 m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, we have performed deep imaging from 0.8 to 8 um of the southern subcluster in the Chamaeleon I…
Space-based photometric surveys have discovered large numbers of planets transiting other stars, but these observe in a single band-pass and yield only the planet radius, orbital period, and transit duration. Information on the masses,…
The far-ultraviolet spectrum of the DAO White Dwarf LS V+4621, the exciting star of the possible planetary nebula Sh 2-216,is strongly contaminated by absorption features from the interstellar medium (ISM). For an ongoing spectral analysis,…
The recent discovery of two large trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) 2003 UB313 and 2005 FY9, with surface properties similar to those of Pluto, provides an exciting new laboratory for the study of processes considered for Pluto and Triton:…
We present multi-wavelength photometric monitoring of WD 1145+017, a white dwarf exhibiting periodic dimming events interpreted to be the transits of orbiting, disintegrating planetesimals. Our observations include the first set of…
Characterization of exoplanets has matured in recent years, particularly through studies of exoplanetary atmospheres of transiting planets at infra-red wavelenegths. The primary source for such observations has been the Spitzer Space…
We show that the high-energy cosmic neutrinos seen by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory can be used to probe interactions between neutrinos and the dark sector that cannot be reached by current cosmological methods. The origin of the…
Near-infrared photometry of transiting extrasolar planets can be of great scientific value. It is however not straightforward to reach the necessary millimagnitude precision. Here we report on our attempts to observe transits and secondary…