We present a new `supercalibration’ technique for measuring systematic distortions in the wavelength scales of high-resolution spectrographs. By comparing spectra of `solar twin’ stars or asteroids with a reference laboratory solar spectrum, distort …

As is well known, it is necessary to derive stellar parameters from massive amounts of spectral data automatically and efficiently. However, in traditional automatic methods such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) and kernel regression (KR), it is …

We present a new straightforward principal component analysis (PCA) method based on the diagonalization of the weighted variance-covariance matrix through two spectral decomposition methods: power iteration and Rayleigh quotient iteration. This meth …

We present a new algorithm for stacking radio interferometric data in the uv-domain. The performance of uv-stacking is compared to the stacking of fully imaged data using simulated Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the Karl G. Jansky …

We present a new method to discriminate periodic from nonperiodic irregularly sampled light curves. We introduce a periodic kernel and maximize a similarity measure derived from information theory to estimate the periods and a discriminator factor. …

Aims: This work investigates the potential of using the wavelength-dependence of galaxy structural parameters (Sérsic index, n, and effective radius, Re) to separate galaxies into distinct types. Methods: A sample of nearby galaxies with reliable …

POLYCHORD is a novel nested sampling algorithm tailored for high-dimensional parameter spaces. In addition, it can fully exploit a hierarchy of parameter speeds such as is found in COSMOMC and CAMB. It utilizes slice sampling at each iteration to sa …

We study the problem of periodicity detection in massive data sets of photometric or radial velocity time series, as presented by ESA’s Gaia mission. Periodicity detection hinges on the estimation of the false alarm probability of the extremum of th …

New telescopes like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will push into a new sensitivity regime and expose systematics, such as direction-dependent effects, that could previously be ignored. Current methods for handling such systematics rely on alterna …

We examine the performance of four different methods which are used to measure mass segregation in star-forming regions: the radial variation of the mass function {M}_MF; the minimum spanning tree-based ΛMSR method; the local surface density ΣLDR …

A powerful method to measure the mass profile of a galaxy is through the velocities of tracer particles distributed through its halo. Transforming this kind of data accurately to a mass profile M(r), however, is not a trivial problem. In particular, …

We present a method for measuring the masses of galaxy clusters using the imprint of their gravitational lensing signal on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. The method first reconstructs the projected gravitational pote …

Current and future astronomical survey facilities provide a remarkably rich opportunity for transient astronomy, combining unprecedented fields of view with high sensitivity and the ability to access previously unexplored wavelength regimes. This is …

We discuss what is an appropriate set of explanatory variables in order to predict the absolute magnitude at the maximum of Type Ia supernovae. In order to have a good prediction, the error for future data, which is called the “generalization error, …

Among the available methods for dating stars, gyrochronology is a powerful one because it requires knowledge of only the star’s mass and rotation period. Gyrochronology relations have previously been calibrated using young clusters, with the Sun pro …

Power-law tails are often seen in probability density functions (PDFs) of molecular cloud column densities, and have been attributed to the effect of gravity. We show that extinction PDFs of a sample of five molecular clouds obtained at a few tenths …

Extracting Times of Arrival (ToAs) from pulsar radio signals depends on the knowledge of the pulsar’s pulse profile and the method being used to compare such profiles. We contrast classical generation mechanism of averaging received intensity to gen …

We present improved estimates of several global properties of the Milky Way, including its current star formation rate (SFR), the stellar mass contained in its disk and bulge+bar components, as well as its total stellar mass. We do so by combining p …

We present improved estimates of several global properties of the Milky Way, including its current star formation rate (SFR), the stellar mass contained in its disk and bulge+bar components, as well as its total stellar mass. We do so by combining p …

In the first three years of operation, the Kepler mission found 3697 planet candidates (PCs) from a set of 18,406 transit-like features detected on more than 200,000 distinct stars. Vetting candidate signals manually by inspecting light curves and o …