Related papers: A General-Purpose Transit Simulator for Arbitrary …
The mutual orbital alignment in multiple planetary systems is an important parameter for understanding their formation. There are a number of elaborate techniques to determine the alignment parameters using photometric or spectroscopic…
Vast amounts of astronomical photometric data are generated from various projects, requiring significant effort to identify variable stars and other object classes. In light of this, a general, widely applicable classification framework…
We present raytracing computations for light emitted from the surface of a rapidly-rotating neutron star in order to construct light curves for X-ray pulsars and bursters. These calculations are for realistic models of rapidly-rotating…
Today's deep high resolution multiwavelength surveys contain a wealth of information about galaxies at different epochs. To fully exploit this information, it is useful to be able to produce highly realistic simulations to compare with the…
Planetary transits provide a unique opportunity to investigate the surface distributions of star spots. Our aim is to determine if, with continuous observation (such as the data that will be provided by the Kepler mission), we can in…
Although histogram methods have been extremely effective for analyzing data from Monte Carlo simulations, they do have certain limitations, including the range over which they are valid and the difficulties of combining data from…
A method is presented which allows the exact construction of conserved (i.e. divergence-free) current vectors from appropriate sets of multipole moments. Physically, such objects may be taken to represent the flux of particles or electric…
We present a new few-parameter phenomenological model of light curves of eclipsing binaries and stars with transiting planets that is able to fit the observed light curves with the accuracy better than 1\% of their amplitudes. The model can…
In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on…
A new generation of exoplanet research beckons and with it the need for simulation tools that accurately predict signal and noise in transit spectroscopy observations. We developed ExoSim: an end-to-end simulator that models noise and…
Dark matter captured in stars can act as an additional heat transport mechanism, modifying fusion rates and asteroseismoloigcal observables. Calculations of heat transport rates rely on approximate solutions to the Boltzmann equation, which…
Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of…
We present a comprehensive methodology for the simulation of astronomical images from optical survey telescopes. We use a photon Monte Carlo approach to construct images by sampling photons from models of astronomical source populations,…
One of the most fascinating predictions of the theory of general relativity is the effect of gravitational lensing, the bending of light in close proximity to massive stellar objects. Recently, artificial optical materials have been…
lightcurver is a photometric pipeline for time series astronomical imaging data, designed for the semi-automatic extraction of precise light curves from small, blended targets. Such targets include, but are not limited to, lensed quasars,…
We present StarryStarryProcess, a novel hierarchical Bayesian framework for mapping stellar surfaces using exoplanet transit light curves. While previous methods relied solely on stellar rotational light curves -- which contain limited…
To prepare for the analyses of the future PLATO light curves, we develop a deep learning model, Panopticon, to detect transits in high precision photometric light curves. Since PLATO's main objective is the detection of temperate Earth-size…
Following the widespread practice of exoplanetary transit simulations, various presumed components of an extrasolar system can be examined in numerically simulated transits, including exomoons, rings around planets, and the deformation of…
A strongly focused laser beam can be used to trap, manipulate and exert torque on a microparticle. The torque is the result of transfer of angular momentum by scattering of the laser beam. The laser could be used to drive a rotor, impeller,…
We use self-consistent N-body models, in conjunction with models of test particles moving in galaxy potentials, to explore the initial effects of interactions on the rotation curves of spiral galaxies. Using nearly self-consistent…