Related papers: Eclipse timing the Milky Way's gravitational poten…
The temporal stability of millisecond pulsars is remarkable, rivaling even some terrestrial atomic clocks at long timescales. Using this property, we show that millisecond pulsars distributed in the galactic neighborhood form an ensemble of…
High precision spectrographs can enable not only the discovery of exoplanets, but can also provide a fundamental measurement in Galactic dynamics. Over about ten year baselines, the expected change in the line-of-sight velocity due to the…
Typical stars in the Milky Way galaxy have velocities of hundreds of kilometres per second and experience gravitational accelerations of $\sim 10^{-10}$ m s$^{-2}$, resulting in velocity changes of a few centimetres per second over a…
The timing method, using either stellar pulsations or eclipse timing of close binaries as a clock, is proving to be an efficient way to detect planets around stars that have evolved beyond the red giant branch. In this article we present a…
Although gravitational waves only interact weakly with matter, their propagation is affected by a gravitational potential. If a gravitational wave source is eclipsed by a star, measuring these perturbations provides a way to directly…
As a planet transits the face of a star, it accelerates along the line-of-sight. The changing delay in the propagation of photons produces an apparent deceleration of the planet across the sky throughout the transit. This persistent…
Abstract abridged. Eclipsing binary systems provide the opportunity to measure the fundamental parameters of their component stars in a stellar-model-independent way. This makes them ideal candidates for testing and calibrating theories of…
We present constraints on the variability and binarity of young stars in the central 10 arcseconds (~0.4 pc) of the Milky Way Galactic Center (GC) using Keck Adaptive Optics data over a 12 year baseline. Given our experiment's photometric…
We derive analytic estimates for the ability with which one can obtain precise, empirical stellar masses and radii via single-lined eclipsing binaries (EBs) in the era of {\it Gaia\/} and {\it TESS}. Including stars that host transiting…
Evolution of binary objects under the influence of tides drastically affects the expected observational properties of the system. With the discovery of a large number of close-in hot Jupiter systems and eclipsing binaries from missions such…
In the era of precision cosmology it is essential to determine the Hubble Constant with an accuracy of 3% or better. Currently, its uncertainty is dominated by the uncertainty in the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) which as the…
We measure the line-of-sight accelerations of 26 binary pulsars due to the Milky Way's gravitational potential, and produce a 3-dimensional map of the acceleration field of the Galaxy. Acceleration measurements directly give us the change…
During the past 20 years, numerous stellar streams have been discovered in both the Milky Way and the Local Group. These streams have been tidally torn from orbiting systems, which suggests that most of them should roughly trace the orbit…
Nearly a century after the discovery that we live in an expanding Universe, and two decades after the discovery of accelerating cosmic expansion, there remains no direct detection of this acceleration via redshift drift - a change in the…
Klioner et al. have used the Gaia EDR3 data to directly measure the solar system's acceleration within the Milky Way using the apparent proper motions of quasars. Here I show that this single absolute acceleration measurement in combination…
In this paper, we determine the detectability of eclipsing binary star companions from eclipse timing variations using the Kepler mission dataset. Extensive and precise stellar time-series photometry from space-based missions enable…
Apsidal motion is the precession of the line of apsides in the orbit of a binary star due to perturbations from General Relativity (GR), tides, or third-body interactions. The rate of precession due to tidal effects depends on the interior…
The dark matter halo of the Milky Way is expected to be triaxial and filled with substructure. It is hoped that streams or shells of stars produced by tidal disruption of stellar systems will provide precise measures of the gravitational…
Few observational constraints exist for the tidal synchronization rate of late-type stars, despite its fundamental role in binary evolution. We visually inspected the light curves of 2278 eclipsing binaries (EBs) from the Kepler Eclipsing…
From its discovery, the WASP-18 system with its massive transiting planet on a tight orbit was identified as a unique laboratory for studies on tidal planet-star interactions. In an analysis of Doppler data, which include five new…