Physics

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 …

Classification of Poorly Time Sampled Light Curves of Periodic Variable Stars

Classification of periodic variable light curves is important for scientific knowledge discovery and efficient use of telescopic resources for source follow-up. In practice, labeled light curves from catalogs with hundreds of flux measurements (the …

Optical Bumps in Cosmological GRBs as Supernovae

From both photometric and broadband spectral monitoring of γ-ray burst (GRB) lightcurve ``bumps,'' particularly in GRB011121, a strong case grew for a supernova (SN) origin. The GRB-SN connection was finally solidified beyond a reasonable doubt with …