5,907 research outputs found
The Auroral Planetary Imaging and Spectroscopy (APIS) service
The Auroral Planetary Imaging and Spectroscopy (APIS) service, accessible
online, provides an open and interactive access to processed auroral
observations of the outer planets and their satellites. Such observations are
of interest for a wide community at the interface between planetology and
magnetospheric and heliospheric physics. APIS consists of (i) a high level
database, built from planetary auroral observations acquired by the Hubble
Space Telescope (HST) since 1997 with its mostly used Far-UltraViolet
spectro-imagers, (ii) a dedicated search interface aimed at browsing
efficiently this database through relevant conditional search criteria and
(iii) the ability to interactively work with the data online through plotting
tools developed by the Virtual Observatory (VO) community, such as Aladin and
Specview. This service is VO compliant and can therefore also been queried by
external search tools of the VO community. The diversity of available data and
the capability to sort them out by relevant physical criteria shall in
particular facilitate statistical studies, on long-term scales and/or
multi-instrumental multi-spectral combined analysis
Systemic: A Testbed For Characterizing the Detection of Extrasolar Planets. I. The Systemic Console Package
We present the systemic Console, a new all-in-one, general-purpose software
package for the analysis and combined multiparameter fitting of Doppler radial
velocity (RV) and transit timing observations. We give an overview of the
computational algorithms implemented in the Console, and describe the tools
offered for streamlining the characterization of planetary systems. We
illustrate the capabilities of the package by analyzing an updated radial
velocity data set for the HD128311 planetary system. HD128311 harbors a pair of
planets that appear to be participating in a 2:1 mean motion resonance. We show
that the dynamical configuration cannot be fully determined from the current
data. We find that if a planetary system like HD128311 is found to undergo
transits, then self-consistent Newtonian fits to combined radial velocity data
and a small number of timing measurements of transit midpoints can provide an
immediate and vastly improved characterization of the planet's dynamical state.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication on PASP. Additional
material at http://www.ucolick.org/~smeschia/systemic.ph
Global correlations between maximum magnitudes of subduction zone interface thrust earthquakes and physical parameters of subduction zones
Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Defining and cataloging exoplanets: The exoplanet.eu database
We describe an online database for extra-solar planetary-mass candidates,
updated regularly as new data are available. We first discuss criteria for the
inclusion of objects in the catalog: "definition" of a planet and several
aspects of the confidence level of planet candidates. {\bf We are led to point
out the conflict between sharpness of belonging or not to a catalogue and
fuzziness of the confidence level.} We then describe the different tables of
extra-solar planetary systems, including unconfirmed candidates (which will
ultimately be confirmed, or not, by direct imaging). It also provides online
tools: histogrammes of planet and host star data, cross-correlations between
these parameters and some VO services. Future evolutions of the database are
presented.Comment: Accepted in Astronomy and Astrophysics (revised version
The Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search Program
We are undertaking an astrometric search for gas giant planets and brown
dwarfs orbiting nearby low mass dwarf stars with the 2.5-m du Pont telescope at
the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. We have built two specialized
astrometric cameras, the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search Cameras (CAPSCam-S
and CAPSCam-N), using two Teledyne Hawaii-2RG HyViSI arrays, with the cameras'
design having been optimized for high accuracy astrometry of M dwarf stars. We
describe two independent CAPSCam data reduction approaches and present a
detailed analysis of the observations to date of one of our target stars, NLTT
48256. Observations of NLTT 48256 taken since July 2007 with CAPSCam-S imply
that astrometric accuracies of around 0.3 milliarcsec per hour are achievable,
sufficient to detect a Jupiter-mass companion orbiting 1 AU from a late M dwarf
10 pc away with a signal-to-noise ratio of about 4. We plan to follow about 100
nearby (primarily within about 10 pc) low mass stars, principally late M, L,
and T dwarfs, for 10 years or more, in order to detect very low mass companions
with orbital periods long enough to permit the existence of habitable,
Earth-like planets on shorter-period orbits. These stars are generally too
faint and red to be included in ground-based Doppler planet surveys, which are
often optimized for FGK dwarfs. The smaller masses of late M dwarfs also yield
correspondingly larger astrometric signals for a given mass planet. Our search
will help to determine whether gas giant planets form primarily by core
accretion or by disk instability around late M dwarf stars.Comment: 48 pages, 9 figures. in press, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacifi
Web-Based Visualization of Very Large Scientific Astronomy Imagery
Visualizing and navigating through large astronomy images from a remote
location with current astronomy display tools can be a frustrating experience
in terms of speed and ergonomics, especially on mobile devices. In this paper,
we present a high performance, versatile and robust client-server system for
remote visualization and analysis of extremely large scientific images.
Applications of this work include survey image quality control, interactive
data query and exploration, citizen science, as well as public outreach. The
proposed software is entirely open source and is designed to be generic and
applicable to a variety of datasets. It provides access to floating point data
at terabyte scales, with the ability to precisely adjust image settings in
real-time. The proposed clients are light-weight, platform-independent web
applications built on standard HTML5 web technologies and compatible with both
touch and mouse-based devices. We put the system to the test and assess the
performance of the system and show that a single server can comfortably handle
more than a hundred simultaneous users accessing full precision 32 bit
astronomy data.Comment: Published in Astronomy & Computing. IIPImage server available from
http://iipimage.sourceforge.net . Visiomatic code and demos available from
http://www.visiomatic.org
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