Related papers: Characterizing the Galactic and Extragalactic Back…
Over the past two decades, thousands of confirmed exoplanets have been detected; the next major challenge is to characterize these other worlds and their stellar systems. Much information on the composition and formation of exoplanets and…
Context. During the primary Kepler mission, between 2009 and 2013, about 150,000 pre-selected targets were observed with a 29.42 minute-long cadence. However, a survey of background stars that fall within the field of view (FOV) of the…
We provide our estimates of the intensity of the gamma-ray emission with an energy near 0.1 TeV generated in inrergalactic space in the interactions of cosmic rays with background emissions. We assume that the cosmic ray sources are…
Microlensing is the method of exoplanet detection that discovers solar system analog exoplanets. These are planets low in mass located in wide orbits around their host stars. Even though thousands of exoplanets are discovered, they are…
Transiting exoplanet atmospheric characterization is currently in a golden age as dozens of exoplanet atmospheres are being studied by NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. This trend is expected to continue with NASA's Pandora…
Normal galaxies are faint and complex X-ray sources that provide very powerful probes for fundamental astrophysical questions. Examples include: the study of populations of X-ray emitting sources; the study of the entire spectrum of…
Direct imaging of exoplanets presents a formidable technical challenge owing to the small angular separation and high contrast between exoplanets and their host stars. High Dispersion Coronagraphy (HDC) is a pathway to achieve unprecedented…
Although interesting in themselves, extragalactic sources emitting in the microwave range (mainly radio-loud active galactic nuclei and dusty galaxies) are also considered a contaminant from the point of view of Cosmic Microwave Background…
The next generation of ground- and space-based observatories will enable direct imaging and characterization of cold, mature planets through thermal emission and, for the first time, reflected light detection. Known RV and astrometrically…
Though missions devoted to time series photometry focus primarily on targets far beyond the solar system, their observations can be contaminated by foreground minor planets, especially near the ecliptic plane where solar system objects are…
We propose a direct imaging method for the detection of exoplanets based on a combined low-rank plus structured sparse model. For this task, we develop a dictionary of possible effective circular trajectories a planet can take during the…
The selection of high redshift sources from broad-band photometry using the Lyman-break galaxy (LBG) technique is a well established methodology, but the characterization of its contamination for the faintest sources is still incomplete. We…
Given their location on the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram, thoroughly characterized subgiant stars can place stringent constraints on a wide range of astrophysical problems. Accordingly, they are prime asteroseismic targets for the…
A next generation of space-based observatories aims to detect and characterize potentially Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars using reflected light spectroscopy. However, it remains unclear how such direct imaging…
We show that space-based telescopes such as the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph will be able to detect the light scattered by the interstellar grains along lines of sight passing near stars in our Galaxy. The relative flux of…
We present a new method to identify luminous off-nuclear X-ray sources in the outskirts of galaxies from large public redshift surveys, distinguishing them from foreground and background interlopers. Using the 3XMM-DR5 catalog of X-ray…
We present a short overview on the extragalactic background radiation from radio to X-rays, with an eye to the relation to galaxy formation and emphasizing on astrophysical backgrounds (as opposed to cosmological). As the radio background,…
Imaging terrestrial exoplanets around nearby stars is a formidable technical challenge, requiring the development of coronagraphs to suppress the stellar halo of diffracted light at the location of the planet. In this review, we derive the…
Measurements of the cross-correlation between the extragalactic gamma-ray background (EGB) and large-scale structure provide a novel probe of dark matter on extragalactic scales. We focus on luminous red galaxies (LRGs) as optimal targets…
Many transiting planet host stars lack high resolution imaging and thus close stellar sources can be missed. Those unknown stars potentially bias the derivation of the planetary and stellar parameters from the transit light curve, no matter…