Related papers: Black Swans in Astronomical Data
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) occur when a star passes close to a massive black hole, so that the tidal forces of the black hole exceed the binding energy of a star and cause it to be ripped apart. Part of the matter will fall onto the…
Telescope Array (TA) experiment has recorded \cite{Abbasi:2017rvx,Okuda_2019} several short time bursts of air shower like events. These bursts are very distinct from conventional single showers, and are found to be strongly correlated with…
We present Chandra X-ray observations of four optically-selected tidal disruption events (TDEs) obtained 4-9 years after discovery. Three sources were detected with luminosities between 9X10^40 and 3X10^42 erg/s. The spectrum of PTF09axc is…
The discovery of radio pulsars over a half century ago was a seminal moment in astronomy. It demonstrated the existence of neutron stars, gave a powerful observational tool to study them, and has allowed us to probe strong gravity, dense…
The first direct observation of a binary neutron star (BNS) merger was a watershed moment in multi-messenger astronomy. However, gravitational waves from GW170817 have only been observed prior to the BNS merger, but electromagnetic…
A persistent challenge in astronomical machine learning is a systematic bias where predictions compress the dynamic range of true values-high values are consistently predicted too low while low values are predicted too high. Understanding…
Advances in astronomy are often driven by serendipitous discoveries. As survey astronomy continues to grow, the size and complexity of astronomical databases will increase, and the ability of astronomers to manually scour data and make such…
We present the first simulations of the tidal disruption of stars with realistic structures and compositions by massive black holes (BHs). We build stars in the stellar evolution code MESA and simulate their disruption in the 3D…
Following the recent evidence for a gravitational wave (GW) background found by pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments, the next major science milestone is resolving individual supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs). The detection of…
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) of giant stars by supermassive black holes (SMBH) differ significantly from those of main sequence ones. Most (all for SMBH of more than a~ few times 10^5 m_\odot) giant-TDEs are partial: only a fraction of…
We provide theoretical and experimental evidence of statistical outliers in random laser emission that are not accounted for by the, now established, power-law tailed (L\'evy) distribution. Such outliers manifest themselves as single, large…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright, millisecond-duration radio pulses whose origins are unknown. To date, only one (FRB 121102) out of several dozen has been seen to repeat, though the extent to which it is exceptional remains unclear. We…
Future measurements of the nature of dark energy using Type Ia supernovae will require a precise characterization of systematic sources of error. Evolutionary effects remain the most uncertain contributor to the overall systematic error…
The tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole provides us with a rare glimpse of these otherwise dormant beasts. It has long been predicted that the disruption will be accompanied by a thermal `flare', powered by the accretion…
Massive black holes are key components of the assembly and evolution of cosmic structures and a number of surveys are currently on-going or planned to probe the demographics of these objects and to gain insight into the relevant physical…
The disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole generates a sudden bright flare. Previous studies have focused on the disruption by single black holes, for which the fallback rate decays as~$\propto t^{-5/3}$. In this paper, we…
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are among the most intriguing phenomena observed in radio astronomy. So far, about 130 FRB signals have been confirmed and characterized by different surveys, and the CHIME telescope has recently reported a new…
In recent years, giant amplitude X-ray flares have been observed from a handful of non-active galaxies. The most plausible scenario of these unusual phenomena is tidal disruption of a star by a quiescent supermassive black hole at the…
Analysis of pulsar timing data have provided evidence for a stochastic gravitational wave background in the nHz frequency band. The most plausible source of such a background is the superposition of signals from millions of supermassive…
The disruption of stars by supermassive black holes has been linked to more than a dozen flares in the cores of galaxies out to redshift $z \sim 0.4$. Modeling these flares properly requires a prediction of the rate of mass return to the…