Related papers: Progress report: probabilistic and statistical bas…
The extragalactic distance scale is fundamental to our understanding of astrophysics and cosmology. In recent years, the surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) method, applied in the near-IR, has proven especially powerful for measuring…
We investigate in detail the hypothesis that low surface brightness galaxies (LSB) differ from ordinary galaxies simply because they form in halos with large spin parameters. We compute star formation rates using the Schmidt law, assuming…
Fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy is applied to study molecules, passing through a small observation volume, usually subjected to diffusive or convective motion in liquid phase. We suggest that such a technique could be used to measure…
Observations of the early Universe (z > 4) with the James Webb Space Telescope reveal galaxy populations with a wide range of intrinsic luminosities and colors. Bursty star formation histories (SFHs), characterized by short-term…
We discuss the transformation of observed photometry into flux for the creation of spectral energy distributions and the computation of bolometric luminosities. We do this in the context of supernova studies, particularly as observed with…
We present a new spectroscopic technique based in part on targeting the upward fluctuations of the surface brightness for studying the internal stellar kinematics and metallicities of low surface brightness galaxies and streams beyond the…
The integrated spectro-photometric properties of star clusters are subject to large cluster-to-cluster variations. They are distributed in non trivial ways around the average properties predicted by standard population synthesis models.…
A method is developed for fitting theoretically predicted astronomical spectra to an observed spectrum. Using a hierarchical Bayesian principle, the method takes both systematic and statistical measurement errors into account, which has not…
A large population of extended substructures generates a stochastic gravitational field that is fully specified by the function $p({\bf F})$, which defines the probability that a tracer particle experiences a force $\bf F$ within the…
A new method of determining galaxy star-formation histories (SFHs) is presented. Using the method, the feasibility of recovering SFHs with multi-band photometry is investigated. The method divides a galaxy's history into discrete time…
Sampling fluctuations in stellar populations give rise to dispersions in observables when a small number of sources contribute effectively to the observables. This is the case for a variety of linear functions of the spectral energy…
We investigate the ability of spectroscopic techniques to yield realistic star formation histories (SFHs) for the bulges of spiral galaxies based on a comparison with their observed broadband colors. Full spectrum fitting to optical spectra…
The search for faint emission or absorption lines in astronomical spectra has received considerable attention in recent years, especially in the X-ray wavelength range. These features usually appear as a deficit or excess of counts in a…
The stellar haloes of galaxies can currently be studied either through observations of resolved halo stars or through surface photometry. Curiously, the two methods appear to give conflicting results, as a number of surface photometry…
Frequency Selective Bolometers (FSBs) are a new type of detector for millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths that are transparent to all but a narrow range of frequencies as set by characteristics of the absorber itself. Therefore, stacks…
In terms of statistical fluctuations, stellar population synthesis models are only asymptotically correct in the limit of a large number of stars, where sampling errors become asymptotically small. When dealing with stellar clusters,…
Anomalously high K-band surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) have been reported in NGC 4489 by Pahre & Mould (1994), Jensen et al. (1996) and Jensen et al. (1998). However, these conclusions were uncertain because of relatively low…
This paper starts with a brief historical review about the PNLF and its use as a distance indicator. Then the PNLF distances are compared with Surface Brightness Fluctuations (SBF) distances and Tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB) distances.…
We present and implement a probabilistic (Bayesian) method for producing catalogs from images of stellar fields. The method is capable of inferring the number of sources N in the image and can also handle the challenges introduced by noise,…
We measured infrared surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distances to an isotropically-distributed sample of 16 distant galaxies with redshifts reaching 10,000 km/s using the near-IR camera and multi-object spectrometer (NICMOS) on the…