Search

Massive stars are predominantly born in stellar associations or clusters. Their radiation fields, stellar winds, and supernovae strongly impact their local environment. In the first few million years of a cluster's life, massive stars are dynamically ejected running away from the cluster at high speed. However, the production rate of dynamically ejected runaways is poorly constrained. Here we report on a sample of 55 massive runaway stars ejected from the young cluster R136 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Astrometric analysis with Gaia reveals two channels of dynamically ejected runaways. The first channel ejects massive stars in all directions and is consistent with dynamical interactions during and after the birth of R136. The second channel launches stars in a preferred direction and may be related to a cluster interaction. We find that 23-33% of the most luminous stars initially born in R136 are runaways. Model predictions have significantly underestimated the dynamical escape fraction of massive stars. Consequently, their role in shaping and heating the interstellar and galactic medium, along with their role in driving galactic outflows, is far more important than previously thought., Comment: Published in Nature on 2024 October 09. 39 pages, 17 figures

In astronomy, there is an opportunity to enhance the practice of validating models through statistical techniques, specifically to account for measurement error uncertainties. While models are commonly used to describe observations, there are instances where there is a lack of agreement between the two. This can occur when models are derived from incomplete theories, when a better-fitting model is not available or when measurement uncertainties are not correctly considered. However, with the application of specific tests that assess the consistency between observations and astrophysical models in a model-independent way, it is possible to address this issue. The consistency tests (ConTESTs) developed in this paper use a combination of non-parametric methods and distance measures to obtain a test statistic that evaluates the closeness of the astrophysical model to the observations. To draw conclusions on the consistency hypothesis, a simulation-based methodology is performed. In particular, we built two tests for density models and two for regression models to be used depending on the case at hand and the power of the test needed. We used ConTEST to examine synthetic examples in order to determine the effectiveness of the tests and provide guidance on using them while building a model. We also applied ConTEST to various astronomy cases, identifying which models were consistent and, if not, identifying the probable causes of rejection.

$\textbf{Aims}$. With the ever-increasing survey speed of optical wide-field telescopes and the importance of discovering transients when they are still young, rapid and reliable source localization is paramount. We present AutoSourceID-Light (ASID-L), an innovative framework that uses computer vision techniques that can naturally deal with large amounts of data and rapidly localize sources in optical images. $\textbf{Methods}$. We show that the AutoSourceID-Light algorithm based on U-shaped networks and enhanced with a Laplacian of Gaussian filter (Chen et al. 1987) enables outstanding performances in the localization of sources. A U-Net (Ronneberger et al. 2015) network discerns the sources in the images from many different artifacts and passes the result to a Laplacian of Gaussian filter that then estimates the exact location. $\textbf{Results}$. Application on optical images of the MeerLICHT telescope demonstrates the great speed and localization power of the method. We compare the results with the widely used SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996) and show the out-performances of our method. AutoSourceID-Light rapidly detects more sources not only in low and mid crowded fields, but particularly in areas with more than 150 sources per square arcminute.

We employ the method used by the GW-Universe Toolbox to generate a synthetic catalogue of detection of stellar mass binary black hole (BBH) mergers. We study advanced LIGO (aLIGO) and Einstein Telescope (ET) as two representatives for the 2nd and 3rd generation GW observatories, and study how GW observations of BBHs can be used to constrain the merger rate as function of redshift and masses. We also simulate the observations from a detector that is half as sensitive as the ET at design which represents an early phase of ET. Two methods are used to obtain the constraints on the source population properties from the catalogues: 1. parametric differential merger rate model and applies a Bayesian inference on the parameters; and 2. non-parametric and uses weighted Kernel density estimators. The results show the overwhelming advantages of the 3rd generation detector over the 2nd generation for the study of BBH population properties, especially at a redshifts higher than ~2, where the merger rate is believed to peak. With the simulated aLIGO catalogue, the parametric Bayesian method can still give some constraints on the merger rate density and mass function beyond its detecting horizon, while the non-parametric method lose the constraining ability completely there. We also find that, despite the numbers of detection of the half-ET can be easily compatible with full ET after a longer observation duration, the catalogue from the full ET can still give much better constraints on the population properties, due to its smaller uncertainties on the physical parameters of the GW events., Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, Accepted by A&A; (the abstract shown above is trimmed in order to fit in the abstract field)

Context. As the importance of Gravitational Wave (GW) Astrophysics increases rapidly, astronomers in different fields and with different backgrounds can have the need to get a quick idea of which GW source populations can be detected by which detectors and with what measurement uncertainties. Aims. The GW-Toolbox is an easy-to-use, flexible tool to simulate observations on the GW universe with different detectors, including ground-based interferometers (advanced LIGO, advanced VIRGO, KAGRA, Einstein Telescope, and also customised designs), space-borne interferometers (LISA and a customised design), pulsar timing arrays mimicking the current working ones (EPTA, PPTA, NANOGrav, IPTA) and future ones. We include a broad range of sources such as mergers of stellar mass compact objects, namely black holes, neutron stars and black hole-neutron stars; and supermassive black hole binaries mergers and inspirals, Galactic double white dwarfs in ultra-compact orbit, extreme mass ratio inspirals and Stochastic GW backgrounds. Methods. We collect methods to simulate source populations and determine their detectability with the various detectors. The paper aims at giving a comprehensive description on the algorithm and functionality of the GW-Toolbox. Results. The GW-Toolbox produces results that are consistent with more detailed calculations of the different source classes and can be accessed with a website interface (gw-universe.org) or as a python package (https://bitbucket.org/radboudradiolab/gwtoolbox). In the future, it will be upgraded with more functionality., Comment: 21 pages, 26 figures, 4 tables. Submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics; Website url: gw-universe.org; comments on v2: made some revisions according to referee's comments; added Cosmic Explorer; comments on v3: make some more clarification in the caveats section, on the waveform and uncertainty estimation

Astronomers require efficient automated detection and classification pipelines when conducting large-scale surveys of the (optical) sky for variable and transient sources. Such pipelines are fundamentally important, as they permit rapid follow-up and analysis of those detections most likely to be of scientific value. We therefore present a deep learning pipeline based on the convolutional neural network architecture called $\texttt{MeerCRAB}$. It is designed to filter out the so called 'bogus' detections from true astrophysical sources in the transient detection pipeline of the MeerLICHT telescope. Optical candidates are described using a variety of 2D images and numerical features extracted from those images. The relationship between the input images and the target classes is unclear, since the ground truth is poorly defined and often the subject of debate. This makes it difficult to determine which source of information should be used to train a classification algorithm. We therefore used two methods for labelling our data (i) thresholding and (ii) latent class model approaches. We deployed variants of $\texttt{MeerCRAB}$ that employed different network architectures trained using different combinations of input images and training set choices, based on classification labels provided by volunteers. The deepest network worked best with an accuracy of 99.5$\%$ and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) value of 0.989. The best model was integrated to the MeerLICHT transient vetting pipeline, enabling the accurate and efficient classification of detected transients that allows researchers to select the most promising candidates for their research goals., Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, Accepted for publication in Experimental Astronomy and appeared in the 3rd Workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences, NeurIPS 2020