Related papers: On the Zero Point Constant of the Bolometric Corre…
Stars appearing in CCD images obtained over 224 nights during the course of 69 observing runs have been calibrated to the Johnson/Kron-Cousins BVRI photometric system defined by the equatorial standards of Landolt (1992, AJ, 104, 340). More…
Measurements of the microlensing optical depth, tau, towards the Galactic bulge appear to depend on the method used to obtain them. Those values based on the lensing of red clump giants (RCGs) appear to be significantly lower than those…
This pedagogical document about stellar photometry - aimed at those for whom astronomical arcana seem arcane - endeavours to explain the concepts of magnitudes, color indices, absolute magnitudes, distance moduli, extinctions, attenuations,…
The cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is a free parameter in Einstein's equations of gravity. We propose to fix its value with a boundary condition: test particles should be free when outside causal contact, e.g. at infinity. Under this…
We consider a dynamical approach to the cosmological constant. There is a scalar field with a potential whose minimum occurs at a generic, but negative, value for the vacuum energy, and it has a non-standard kinetic term whose coefficient…
Only astronomical observations can effectively probe in space-time the variabil ity of the physical dimensionless constants such as the fine structure constant and proton-to-electron mass ratio, \mu, which are related to fund amental forces…
Khatri and Wandelt reported that change in the value of alpha by 1% changes the mean brightness temperature $T_b$ decrement of the CMB due to 21 cm absorption by 5% over the redshift range z $<$ 50. A drawback of their approach is that the…
The recent measurement by the CDF Collaboration of the $W$ boson mass is in significant tension with the Standard Model expectation, showing a discrepancy of seven standard deviations. A larger value of $m_W$ affects the global electroweak…
In this paper we test the astrometric precision of VLT/FORS2 observations using a serie of CCD frames taken in Galactic bulge area. A special reduction method based on symmetrization of reference fields was used to reduce the atmospheric…
We present a new procedure for photometric parallax estimation. The data for 1236 stars provide calibrations between the absolute magnitude offset from the Hyades main-sequence and the UV-excess for different (B-V)o colour-index intervals,…
Although cosmologists have been trying to determine the value of the Hubble constant for nearly 65 years, they have only succeeded in limiting the range of possibilities: most of the current observational determinations place the Hubble…
In this proceeding we review and expand on our recent work investigating the constancy of the absolute magnitude $M_B$ of Type Ia supernovae. In it, we used baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) to calibrate the supernova data and to check…
The vector balancing constant $\mathrm{vb}(K,Q)$ of two symmetric convex bodies $K,Q$ is the minimum $r \geq 0$ so that any number of vectors from $K$ can be balanced into an $r$-scaling of $Q$. A question raised by Schechtman is whether…
A general deterministic analysis to state the necessary conditions with a coefficient determination for the variational source condition to hold is provided. Of particular interest in terms of the choice of the regularization parameter, it…
A new cosmological test is derived, based on the distribution of individual V/Vmax in a complete redshift-limited sample of distant objects. The fundamental assumption is that, in any bin of absolute luminosity, individual V/Vmax are…
Recent attempts at measuring the variation of $c$ using an assortment of standard candles and the redshift-dependent Hubble expansion rate inferred from the currently available catalog of cosmic chronometers have tended to show that the…
A new determination of the sound horizon scale in angular coordinates is presented. It makes use of ~ 0.6 x 10^6 Luminous Red Galaxies, selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data, with photometric redshifts. The analysis covers…
The availability of reliable bolometric corrections and reddening estimates, rather than the quality of parallaxes will be one of the main limiting factors in determining the luminosities of a large fraction of Gaia stars. With this goal in…
Tests based on heteroskedasticity robust standard errors are an important technique in econometric practice. Choosing the right critical value, however, is not simple at all: conventional critical values based on asymptotics often lead to…
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs) are crucial in cosmological analysis, providing a standard ruler, as well as constraints on dark energy. In General Relativity models, the BAO Linear Point - the midpoint between the dip and the peak in…