Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies

A Ubiquitous Unifying Degeneracy in 2-body Microlensing Systems

While gravitational microlensing by planetary systems can provide unique vistas on the properties of exoplanets, observations of such 2-body microlensing events can often be explained with multiple and distinct physical configurations, so-called …

Science with the Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX)

The Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX) will undertake a synoptic survey of the entire sky in near-UV (NUV) and far-UV (FUV) bands, probing the dynamic FUV and NUV universe, as well as perform a modern, all- sky imaging survey that reaches 50 times deeper …

The Palomar Transient Factory Core-collapse Supernova Host-galaxy Sample. I. Host-galaxy Distribution Functions and Environment Dependence of Core-collapse Supernovae

Several thousand core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) of different flavors have been discovered so far. However, identifying their progenitors has remained an outstanding open question in astrophysics. Studies of SN host galaxies have proven to be …

The Palomar Transient Factory Core-Collapse Supernova Host-Galaxy Sample. I. Host-Galaxy Distribution Functions and Environment-Dependence of CCSNe

Astro2020 Science White Paper: Are Supernovae the Dust Producer in the Early Universe?

Whether supernovae are a significant source of dust has been a long- standing debate. The large quantities of dust observed in high- redshift galaxies raise a fundamental question as to the origin of dust in the Universe since stars cannot have …

Mapping the Interstellar Reddening and Extinction toward Baadetextquoterights Window Using Minimum Light Colors of ab-type RR Lyrae Stars: Revelations from the De-reddened Color-Magnitude Diagrams

We have obtained repeated images of six fields toward the Galactic bulge in five passbands (u, g, r, i, z) with the DECam imager on the Blanco 4 m telescope at CTIO. From more than 1.6 billion individual photometric measurements in the field centered …

A Near-infrared Period-Luminosity Relation for Miras in NGC 4258, an Anchor for a New Distance Ladder

We present year-long, near-infrared (NIR) Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFC3 observations of Mira variables in the water megamaser host galaxy NGC 4258. Miras are asymptotic giant branch variables that can be divided into oxygen- (O-) and carbon- (C-) …

Illuminating gravitational waves: A concordant picture of photons from a neutron star merger

Merging neutron stars offer an excellent laboratory for simultaneously studying strong-field gravity and matter in extreme environments. We establish the physical association of an electromagnetic counterpart (EM170817) with gravitational waves …

The host galaxies and explosion sites of long-duration gamma ray bursts: Hubble Space Telescope near-infrared imaging

We present the results of a Hubble Space Telescope WFC3/F160W Snapshot survey of the host galaxies of 39 long-duration gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs) at z < 3. We have non-detections of hosts at the locations of four bursts. Sufficient accuracy to …

The SAMI Galaxy Survey: the link between angular momentum and optical morphology

We investigate the relationship between stellar and gas specific angular momentum j, stellar mass M$_*$ and optical morphology for a sample of 488 galaxies extracted from the Sydney-AAO Multi- object Integral field Galaxy Survey. We find that j, …