astro-ph.IM Archives

Schematic of the four possible branches resulting from an experiment of a randomly selected target, where the experiment seeks to detect a phenomenon which occurs within a fraction f of the targets under consideration, and the experiment has a confounding positive probability of CPP and a true positive probability of TPP. -- astro-ph.IM

Astrobiology (general), SETI & Technosignatures, Status Report

Deconstructing Alien Hunting

by Keith CowingNovember 17, 2023November 17, 2023

The search for extraterrestrial (alien) life is one of the greatest scientific quests yet raises fundamental questions about just what we should be looking for and how.

Implementation of the FIM inside the IFS arm of SPHERE. On the left drawing, the SPHERE components are labelled in black, while the FIM components are labelled in red. The inset in the top right shows the components of the core optics bench. The light path in the system is fully illustrated in Vigan et al. (2022b, their Fig. 3). The picture on the right shows the FIM at the end of the installation in SPHERE. The IFS Lyot wheel is visible in the bottom left of the picture. -- astro-ph.EP

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

First Light of VLT/HiRISE: High-resolution Spectroscopy Of Young Giant Exoplanets

by Keith CowingNovember 17, 2023

A major endeavor of this decade is the direct characterization of young giant exoplanets at high spectral resolution to determine the composition of their atmosphere and infer their formation processes […]

The major subsystems of the Coronagraph Instrument.2 The optical bench sits above the electronics pallet. The Electronics Heat Transport System (EHTS) transports heat from the electronics to the warm radiator. The Cryogenic Thermal Subsystem provides passive cooling to the detectors. Multi-layer insulation (MLI) provides additional thermal shielding. The Instrument Carrier (IC) is the observatory structure to which Coronagraph is mounted. -- astro-ph.EP

Astronomy & Telescopes, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones, Status Report

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument Overview and Status

by Keith CowingNovember 12, 2023November 12, 2023

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument is a critical technology demonstrator for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory.

This plot shows each of the stars that were searched for technosignatures, emanating out from our observation point here on Earth. The colour bar shows the distance these stars are in units of kiloparsecs/ CREDIT Owen Johnson and Evan Keane, Trinity College Dublin

Astronomy & Telescopes, Press Release, SETI & Technosignatures

Astrophysicists Scan The Galaxy For Signs Of Life

by Keith CowingOctober 27, 2023October 27, 2023

Astrophysicists from Trinity College Dublin are scanning the Universe for “technosignatures” emanating from distant planets that would provide support for the existence of intelligent, alien life.

Approximate trade-off between flexibility and interpretability of ML models for astronomy. Here, high flexibility generally result in very strong fits to complex training data, but these models may suffer from overfitting, slow computation time, and poor generalization, in addition to non-interpretability. Low flexibility models may be unable to fit extremely complex problems, but will often be the preferred solution in many astronomy problems where simpler baselines have been established. We note that the axes of this plot are qualitative and, in practice, will depend highly on the specific problem. Each referenced model class includes a citation of an example application paper in astronomy. -- astro-ph.IM

AI - Data - Apps - Cybernetics, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

Constructing Impactful Machine Learning Research For Astronomy: Best Practices For Researchers And Reviewers

by Keith CowingOctober 23, 2023October 20, 2023

Machine learning has rapidly become a tool of choice for the astronomical community. It is being applied across a wide range of wavelengths and problems, from the classification of transients […]

A high-level diagram of the data flow from the VLA antennas in the context of COSMIC. The signals from each antenna pass through the receivers, and in the 8-bit mode (the VLA can operate in both a 3-bit and an 8-bit mode), all receiving frequencies are shifted to the X-band (8–10 GHz; upper side band). COSMIC receives one copy of the digitized signals after they are amplified through an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA). The other copy is processed through the W IDAR correlator for standard VLA processing. -- astro-ph.IM

Astronomy & Telescopes, SETI & Technosignatures, Status Report

COSMIC: An Ethernet-based Commensal, Multimode Digital Backend on the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

by Keith CowingOctober 17, 2023October 17, 2023

The primary goal of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is to gain an understanding of the prevalence of technologically advanced beings (organic or inorganic) in the Galaxy.

Example simulated SCALES L band observations of an HR 8799 analog, with three planets having effective temperatures between 900 K and 1100 K and radii of 1 RJ. Top panels show ADI-processed slices from a low-resolution L band mock observation of a system of exoplanets similar to HR 8799. The bottom panel shows the recovered spectra for the three injected planets (green, purple, blue lines) plotted over the injected spectra (grey lines). The vertical lines in the bottom panel indicate the wavelengths of the three images in the top panels. The simulated observations assumed one hour of total integration time spread over ∼ 80◦ of parallactic angle evolution. -- astro-ph.IM

Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

The Slicer Combined With Array Of Lenslets For Exoplanet Spectroscopy (SCALES): Driving Science Cases And Expected Outcomes

by Keith CowingOctober 12, 2023October 12, 2023

The Slicer Combined with Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy (SCALES) is a 2−5 μm, high-contrast integral field spectrograph (IFS) currently being built for Keck Observatory.

5400+ confirmed exoplanets as of the 11th of August 2023 on a Jupiter mass vs orbital period plot. The Earth is shown on the plot to indicate where an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star would appear. The blue region highlights the terrestrial regime. Very few Earth mass/size planets have been detected thus far. Only a handful are in the habitable zone of their host star. Data taken from exoplanetsarchive.ipac.caltech.edu -- astro-ph.IM

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

The Path To Detecting Extraterrestrial Life With Astrophotonics

by Keith CowingOctober 9, 2023October 9, 2023

Astrophysical research into exoplanets has delivered thousands of confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. These planets span a wide ranges of size and composition, with diversity also being the hallmark of […]

Histograms of hits and events for XX as functions of frequency, drift rate and S/N. Frequency bands of catalogued interference sources are displayed on the frequency panel. The blue bars show the distributions of the hits detected by all 19 beams. The orange bars show the distributions of the events detected by Beam 1. -- astro-ph.SR

Astronomy & Telescopes, Barnard's Star, SETI & Technosignatures, Status Report

The Most Sensitive SETI Observations Toward Barnard’s Star With FAST

by Keith CowingSeptember 28, 2023October 1, 2024

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been mainly focused on nearby stars and their planets in recent years. Barnard’s star is the second closest star system to the sun and […]

Results for our simulated atmospheric retrieval of an Earth-like planet using petitRADTRANS, LIFEsim, and PyMultiNest. Left: The retrieved PT profiles for the polynomial baseline and our model, together with the emission contribution function. Right: The relative fitting error of the spectrum, computed as (true spectrum − simulated spectrum) / true spectrum. -- astro-ph.IM

AI - Data - Apps - Cybernetics, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Status Report

Parameterizing Pressure-temperature Profiles Of Exoplanet Atmospheres With Neural Networks

by Keith CowingSeptember 7, 2023September 7, 2023

Atmospheric retrievals (AR) of exoplanets typically rely on a combination of a Bayesian inference technique and a forward simulator to estimate atmospheric properties from an observed spectrum. A key component […]

astro-ph.IM

Deconstructing Alien Hunting

First Light of VLT/HiRISE: High-resolution Spectroscopy Of Young Giant Exoplanets

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Instrument Overview and Status

Astrophysicists Scan The Galaxy For Signs Of Life

Constructing Impactful Machine Learning Research For Astronomy: Best Practices For Researchers And Reviewers

COSMIC: An Ethernet-based Commensal, Multimode Digital Backend on the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The Slicer Combined With Array Of Lenslets For Exoplanet Spectroscopy (SCALES): Driving Science Cases And Expected Outcomes

The Path To Detecting Extraterrestrial Life With Astrophotonics

The Most Sensitive SETI Observations Toward Barnard’s Star With FAST

Parameterizing Pressure-temperature Profiles Of Exoplanet Atmospheres With Neural Networks

Sea Ice As An Origin Of Life Location For Hycean And Ocean Worlds

Viruses, Proviruses and Satellites from Asgard Archaea Enrichments Reveal Complex Microbial Interactions

Mars Rover Curiosity’s Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) Calibration

Carbon and Sulfur Isotopes of Microfossils and Pyrites from Neoarchean Cherts: Microbial Diversity in an Ancient Deep-Marine Environment

Auroral Belts As Magnetically Localized Reactors For Prebiotic Chemistry On Early Earth