Nowadays there is no field research which is not flooded with data. Among the sciences, astrophysics has always been driven by the analysis of massive amounts of data. The development of new and more sophisticated observation facilities, both ground-based and spaceborne, has led data more and more complex (Variety), an exponential growth of both data Volume (i.e., in the order of petabytes), and Velocity in terms of production and transmission. Therefore, new and advanced processing solutions will be needed to process this huge amount of data. We investigate some of these solutions, based on machine learning models as well as tools and architectures for Big Data analysis that can be exploited in the astrophysical context.

Synoptic maps of the vector magnetic field have routinely been made available from stellar observations and recently have started to be obtained for the solar photospheric field. Although solar magnetic maps show a multitude of details, stellar maps are limited to imaging large-scale fields only. In spite of their lower resolution, magnetic field imaging of solar-type stars allow us to put the Sun in a much more general context. However, direct comparison between stellar and solar magnetic maps are hampered by their dramatic differences in resolution. Here, I present the results of a method to filter out the small-scale component of vector fields, in such a way that comparison between solar and stellar (large-scale) magnetic field vector maps can be directly made. This approach extends the technique widely used to decompose the radial component of the solar magnetic field to the azimuthal and meridional components as well, and is entirely consistent with the description adopted in several stellar studies. This method can also be used to confront synoptic maps synthesised in numerical simulations of dynamo and magnetic flux transport studies to those derived from stellar observations.

The Calar Alto Secondary Eclipse study was a program dedicated to observe secondary eclipses in the near-IR of two known close-orbiting exoplanets around K-dwarfs: WASP-10b and Qatar-1b. Such observations reveal hints on the orbital configuration of the system and on the thermal emission of the exoplanet, which allows the study of the brightness temperature of its atmosphere. The observations were performed at the Calar Alto Observatory (Spain). We used the OMEGA2000 instrument (Ks band) at the 3.5m telescope. The data was acquired with the telescope strongly defocused. The differential light curve was corrected from systematic effects using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique. The final light curve was fitted using an occultation model to find the eclipse depth and a possible phase shift by performing a MCMC analysis. The observations have revealed a secondary eclipse of WASP-10b with depth of 0.137%, and a depth of 0.196% for Qatar-1b. The observed phase offset from expected mid-eclipse was of −0.0028 for WASP-10b, and of −0.0079 for Qatar-1b. These measured offsets led to a value for |ecosω| of 0.0044 for the WASP-10b system, leading to a derived eccentricity which was too small to be of any significance. For Qatar-1b, we have derived a |ecosω| of 0.0123, however, this last result needs to be confirmed with more data. The estimated Ks-band brightness temperatures are of 1647 K and 1885 K for WASP-10b and Qatar-1b, respectively. We also found an empirical correlation between the (R′HK) activity index of planet hosts and the Ks-band brightness temperature of exoplanets, considering a small number of systems.

The role of tachoclines, the thin shear layers that separate solid body from differential rotation in the interior of late-type stars, in stellar dynamos is still controversial. In this work we discuss their relevance in view of recent results from global dynamo simulations performed with the EULAG-MHD code. The models have solar-like stratification and different rotation rates (i.e., different Rossby number). Three arguments supporting the key role of tachoclines are presented: the solar dynamo cycle period, the origin of torsional oscillations and the scaling law of stellar magnetic fields as function of the Rossby number. This scaling shows a regime where the field strength increases with the rotation and a saturated regime for fast rotating stars. These properties are better reproduced by models that consider the convection zone and a fraction of the radiative core, naturally developing a tachocline, than by those that consider only the convection zone.

Radio survey datasets comprise an increasing number of individual observations stored as sets of multidimensional data. In large survey projects, astronomers commonly face limitations regarding: 1) interactive visual analytics of sufficiently large subsets of data; 2) synchronous and asynchronous collaboration; and 3) documentation of the discovery workflow. To support collaborative data inquiry, we present encube, a large-scale comparative visual analytics framework. encube can utilise advanced visualization environments such as the CAVE2 (a hybrid 2D and 3D virtual reality environment powered with a 100 Tflop/s GPU-based supercomputer and 84 million pixels) for collaborative analysis of large subsets of data from radio surveys. It can also run on standard desktops, providing a capable visual analytics experience across the display ecology. encube is composed of four primary units enabling compute-intensive processing, advanced visualisation, dynamic interaction, parallel data query, along with data management. Its modularity will make it simple to incorporate astronomical analysis packages and Virtual Observatory capabilities developed within our community. We discuss how encube builds a bridge between high-end display systems (such as CAVE2) and the classical desktop, preserving all traces of the work completed on either platform – allowing the research process to continue wherever you are.

We determined individual distances to a small number of rather round, quite regularly shaped planetary nebulae by combining their angular expansion in the plane of the sky with a spectroscopically measured expansion along the line of sight. For this goal, we combined up to three epochs of Hubble Space Telescope imaging data and determined the respective proper motions of rim and shell edges, and of other features as well. Ground-based radial velocities are assigned separately to the nebular rims and shells and used to determine individual distances, thereby assuming that the expansions in the line-of-sight and in the plane of sky are equal. We employed 1D radiation-hydrodynamics simulations of planetary nebulae evolution to correct for the difference between the spectroscopically measured expansion velocities of rim and shell and the expansion speeds of their respective shock fronts.

Recent high-precision photometry from space (e.g., Kepler) enables us to investigate the nature of “superflares” on solar-type stars. The bolometric energy of superflares detected by Kepler ranges from 1033 erg to 1036 erg which is 10-10,000 times larger than that released by a typical X10 class solar flare. The occurrence frequency (dN/dE) of superflares as a function of flare energy (E) shows the power-law distribution with the power-law index of ~−1.8 for 1034 < E < 1036 erg. Most of superflare stars show quasi-periodic light variations which suggest the presence of large starspots. The bolometric energy released by flares is consistent with the magnetic energy stored near the starspots. The occurrence frequency of superflares increases as the rotation period decreases. However, the energy of the largest flares observed in a given period bin does not show any clear correlation with the rotation period. These results suggest that superflares would occur on the slowly-rotating stars.

Here we simulate the shape of a planetary transit observed at radio wavelengths. The simulations use a light curve of the K4 star HAT-P-11 and its hot Jupiter companion as proxy. From the HAT-P-11 optical light curve, a prominent spot was identified (1.10 R P and 0.6 I C ). On the radio regime, the limb brighting of 30% was simulated by a quadratic function, and the active region was assumed to have the same size of the optical spot. Considering that the planet size is 6.35% of the the stellar radius, for the quiet star regions the transit depth is smaller than 0.5%, however, this value can increase to ~2% when covering an active region with 5.0 times the quiet star brightness temperature.

The study of planetary nebulae started more than a century ago. Since then the understanding of these exciting objects has advanced extraordinarily. I present a personal selection of topics to reflect on some developments of PNe research.

The fast stellar winds can blow bubbles in the circumstellar material ejected from previous phases of stellar evolution. These are found at different scales, from planetary nebulae (PNe) around stars evolving to the white dwarf stage, to Wolf-Rayet (WR) bubbles and up to large-scale bubbles around massive star clusters. In all cases, the fast stellar wind is shock-heated and a hot bubble is produced. Processes of mass evaporation and mixing of nebular material and heat conduction occurring at the mixing layer between the hot bubble and the optical nebula are key to determine the thermal structure of these bubbles and their evolution. In this contribution we review our current understanding of the X-ray observations of hot bubbles in PNe and present the first spatially-resolved study of a mixing layer in a PN.

We present a database of 11 interplanetary shocks associated to coronal mass ejections (CMEs) observed by STEREO and Wind missions between 2006 and 2011 that show evidence of Type II radio burst. For all events, we calculated the principal characteristics of the shock driver, the intensity and geometrical configuration of the in-situ shock and checked for the existence of in-situ type II radio burst. We made a comparative analysis of two CME events (on 18 August 2010 and 4 June 2011), which are apparently associated to two or more magnetic structures which interact in space (i.e. CMEs, SIRs, CIRs). These events show varied shock configurations and intensities. We found evidence of in-situ type II radio bursts in one of the events studied, suggesting that the geometry of the shock (quasi-perpendicularity) is also critical for the generation and/or detection of radio emission in-situ.

In this work, we report physical parameters and abundances derived for a sample of 15 high extinction planetary nebulae located in the inner 2° of the Galactic bulge, based on low dispersion spectroscopy secured at the SOAR telescope using the Goodman spectrograph. The new data allow us to extend our database including older, weaker objects that are at the faint end of the planetary nebulae luminosity function. The data provide chemical compositions for PNe located in this region of the bulge to explore the chemical enrichment history of the central region of the Galactic bulge. The results show that the abundances of our sample are skewed to higher metallicities than previous data in the outer regions of the bulge. This can indicate a faster chemical enrichment taking place at the Galactic centre.

Binary stars can interact via mass transfer when one member (the primary) ascends onto a giant branch. The amount of gas ejected by the binary and the amount of gas accreted by the secondary over the lifetime of the primary influence the subsequent binary phenomenology. Some of the gas ejected by the binary will remain gravitationally bound and its distribution will be closely related to the formation of planetary nebulae. We investigate the nature of mass transfer in binary systems containing an AGB star by adding radiative transfer to the AstroBEAR AMR Hydro/MHD code.

We have performed 3D hydrodynamic simulations of a symmetrical jet ejection following previous works (Raga et al. 2009, Riera et al. 2014, Velázquez et al. 2014). The jet is emitted from a binary system in elliptical orbit, and its direction changes describing a precession cone. We have considered that the jet has a time-dependence density ejection or a time-dependence velocity ejection, in order to propose an alternative model to explain the morphology of PPNe’s. Also in our description we have included the effect of the photoionization of the central source. From numerical results, synthetic Hα maps were obtained, and a proper motion study were carried out. We found that the photoionization has an important effect on the case with variation density resulting in a increse in the Hα emission.

The characterization of short-period detached low-mass binaries, by the determination of their physical and orbital parameters, reveal the most precise basic parameters of low-mass stars. Particularly, when photometric and spectroscopic data of eclipsing binaries (EBs) are combined. Recently, 16 new low-mass EBs were discovered by the WFCAM Transit Survey (WTS), however, only three of them were fully characterized. Therefore, new spectroscopic data were already acquired with the objective to characterize five new detached low-mass EBs discovered in the WTS, with short periods between 0.59 and 1.72 days. A preliminary analysis of the radial velocity and light curves was performed, where we have derived orbital separations of 2.88 to 6.69 R ⊙, and considering both components, we have found stellar radii ranging from 0.40 to 0.80 R ⊙, and masses between 0.24 and 0.71 M ⊙. In addition to the determination of the orbital parameters of these systems, the relation between mass, radius and orbital period of these objects can be investigated in order to study the mass-radius relationship and the radius anomaly in the low main-sequence.

Machine learning techniques have proven to be increasingly useful in astronomical applications over the last few years, for example in object classification, estimating redshifts and data mining. One example of object classification is classifying galaxy morphology. This is a tedious task to do manually, especially as the datasets become larger with surveys that have a broader and deeper search-space. The Kaggle Galaxy Zoo competition presented the challenge of writing an algorithm to find the probability that a galaxy belongs in a particular class, based on SDSS optical spectroscopy data. The use of convolutional neural networks (convnets), proved to be a popular solution to the problem, as they have also produced unprecedented classification accuracies in other image databases such as the database of handwritten digits (MNIST †) and large database of images (CIFAR ‡). We experiment with the convnets that comprised the winning solution, but using broad classifications. The effect of changing the number of layers is explored, as well as using a different activation function, to help in developing an intuition of how the networks function and to see how they can be applied to radio galaxy images.

Bulk outflow or global expansion velocities are presented for a large number of planetary nebulae (PNe) that span a wide range of evolutionary stages and different stellar populations. The sample comprises 133 PNe from the Galactic bulge, 100 mature and highly evolved PNe from the disk, 11 PNe from the Galactic halo and 15 PNe with very low central star masses and low metallicities, for a total of 259 PNe. These results reveal from a statistical perspective the kinematic evolution of the expansion velocities of PNe in relation to changing characteristics of the central star’s wind and ionizing luminosity and as a function of the evolutionary rate determined by the central (CS) mass. The large number of PNe utilized in this work for each group of PNe under study and the homogeneity of the data provide for the first time a solid benchmark form observations for model predictions, as has been described by López et al. (2016).

The magnetic flux emergence can help understand the physical mechanism responsible for solar atmospheric phenomena. Emerging magnetic flux is frequently related to eruptive events, because when emerging they can reconnected with the ambient field and release magnetic energy. We will use a physic-based model to reconstruct the evolution of the solar emission based on the configuration of the photospheric magnetic field. The structure of the coronal magnetic field is estimated by employing force-free extrapolation NLFFF based on vector magnetic field products (SHARPS) observed by HMI instrument aboard SDO spacecraft from Sept. 29 (2013) to Oct. 07 (2013). The coronal plasma temperature and density are described and the emission is estimated using the CHIANTI atomic database 8.0. The performance of the our model is compared to the integrated emission from the AIA instrument aboard SDO spacecraft in the specific wavelengths 171Å and 304Å.

The Digitised First Byurakan Survey (DFBS) provides low dispersion optical spectra for about 24 million sources. A two-step machine learning algorithm based on similarities to predefined templates is applied to select different classes of rare objects in the dataset automatically, for example late type stars, quasars and white dwarves. Identifying outliers from the groups of common astrophysical objects may lead to discovery of rare objects, such as gamma-ray burst afterglows.