astrobites
statistics
The Frequency of (Habitable?) Planets Around M dwarfs
The census of planets for smaller stars—M dwarfs—is now basically complete. In this paper, Courtney Dressing and Dave Charbonneau use this M dwarf advantage to determine the occurrence rate of small planets around M dwarfs.
Sgr A*: A flickering black hole
Witzel et. al examine the statistical properties of the photometric variability of our Galaxy’s central black hole.
Is God right-handed? Spiral galaxies’ rotation and isotropy
Title: Handedness asymmetry of spiral galaxies with z<0.3 shows cosmic parity violation and a dipole axis Authors: L. Shamir First Author’s Institution: Lawrence Technological University A cherished principle of cosmology is isotropy—that things look the same whatever direction you look. The cosmic microwave background, radiation left over from 300,000 years after the Big Bang, is [...]
How Common Are Long-Period Jupiters Around Massive Stars?
What fraction of massive stars host gas giants? Vigan et al. observe a sample of A and F stars to find out.
Code you can use: the MCMC Hammer
What’s the best way to sample a banana? A new code implements an efficient solution to this and other Bayesian inference problems.
New Kid on the Block: Scaling the SZ Effect in Clusters
Estimating galaxy cluster masses is difficult, but it might be getting more precise thanks to the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect.
Your Gateway to the Bayesian Realm
This post is written by Benjamin Nelson, a graduate student in the Astronomy Department at the University of Florida. He works with Dr. Eric Ford on the characterization and dynamical evolution of extrasolar planets. He is currently developing an N-body Markov chain Monte Carlo for RV observations of exoplanet systems. Why is this important to [...]
Bars Rejuvenating Bulges?
Paper title: Bars rejuvenating bulges? Evidence from stellar population analysis Authors: Paula Coelho and Dimitri A. Gadotti First author’s affiliation:Núcleo de Astrofísica Teórica, Universidade Cruzeiro do Sul, São Paulo, Brasil Summary As you may recall from Nathan Sanders’ April post, some spiral galaxies have central bulges with high concentrations of stars. Coelho and Gadotti examine [...]
How Many Exoplanets are Habitable?
The answer to the above question, according to a new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler mission, may be roughly one-third.
Super-Earths or Mini-Neptunes: Part Two
Wolfgang & Laughlin combine observations from the HARPS radial velocity survey and the Kepler transit survey to investigate the mass-radius-period distribution of exoplanets. They find that most small planets are rocky.
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