We developed a method that allows to classify the light curves of eclipsing binaries of the W UMa type (EW) with respect to their intrinsic variability. The algorithm measures several features of light curves, such as the amplitude of the O’Connell effect, the separation and location of maxima brightness as well as depths of the minima in subsequent orbital periods. This method is capable of distinguishing systems with presumed magnetic activity present from these without it, as well as recognizing systems with starspots migration and those with other types of intrinsic variability manifestation. The classification is done in an automatic way without a time consuming, visual inspection of light curves.

The Io Plasma Torus (IPT) is a doughnut-shaped structure of charged particles, composed mainly of sulfur and oxygen ions. The main source of the IPT is the moon Io, the most volcanically active object in the Solar System. Io is the innermost of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, the main source of the magnetospheric plasma and responsible for injecting nearly 1 ton/s of ions into Jupiter's magnetosphere. In this work ground-based observations of the [SII] 6731 Å emission lines are observed, obtained at the MacMath-Pierce Solar Telescope. The results shown here were obtained in late 1997 and occurred shortly after a period of important eruptions observed by the Galileo mission (1996-2003). Several outbursts were observed and periods of intense volcanic activity are important to correlate with periods of brightness enhancements observed at the IPT. The time of response between an eruption and enhancement at IPT is still not well understood.

A consensus has grown in the past few decades that binarity is key to understanding the morphological diversities of the circumstellar envelopes (CSEs) surrounding stars in the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) to Planetary Nebula (PN) phase. The possible roles of binaries in their shaping have, however, yet to be confirmed. Meanwhile, recurrent patterns are often found in the CSEs of AGB stars and the outer halos of PNe, providing a fossil record of the mass loss during the AGB phase. In this regard, recent molecular line observations using interferometric facilities have revealed the spatio-kinematics of such patterns. Numerical simulations of binary interactions producing spiral-shells have been extensively developed, revealing new probes for extracting the stellar and orbital properties from these patterns. I review recent theoretical and observational investigations on the circumstellar spiral-shell patterns and discuss their implications in linking binary properties to the asymmetric ejection events in the post-AGB phase.

About three years after Gaia was set into orbit, the first release of Gaia data, DR1, has been published by ESA and DPAC. Gaia’s first archive contains the results from the analysis of the initial 14 months of mission data. Outstandingly, it includes TGAS, Gaia-Tycho2 astrometric solution for about 2 million stars up to visible magnitude around 11.5.

In addition to the five parameter astrometric solution for the sky (positions, parallaxes and proper motions), future Gaia data releases will provide the spectral energy distributions from 330-1050 nm, together with radial velocities, for sources brighter than visible magnitude 16. Within this context, the relevance of Gaia data for the study of PN is be briefly presented.

Nearly 50 years ago, in the proceedings of the first IAU symposium on planetary nebulae, Lawrence H. Aller and Stanley J. Czyzak said that “the problem of determination of the chemical compositions of planetary and other gaseous nebulae constitutes one of the most exasperating problems in astrophysics”. Although the situation has greatly improved over the years, many important problems are still open and new questions have arrived to the field, which still is an active field of study. Here I will review some of the main aspects related to the determination of gaseous abundances in PNe and some relevant results derived in the last five years, since the last IAU symposium on PNe.

The astrophysics community uses different tools for computational tasks such as complex systems simulations, radiative transfer calculations or big data. Programming languages like Fortran, C or C++ are commonly present in these tools and, generally, the language choice was made based on the need for performance. However, this comes at a cost: safety. For instance, a common source of error is the access to invalid memory regions, which produces random execution behaviors and affects the scientific interpretation of the results.

In 2015, Mozilla Research released the first stable version of a new programming language named Rust. Many features make this new language attractive for the scientific community, it is open source and it guarantees memory safety while offering zero-cost abstraction.

We explore the advantages and drawbacks of Rust for astrophysics by re-implementing the fundamental parts of Mercury-T, a Fortran code that simulates the dynamical and tidal evolution of multi-planet systems.

In the past few years we provided strong observational support for theoretical studies regarding the internal kinematics of Planetary Nebulae (PNe). A total of 257 objects segregated by different galactic populations were analized. Based upon spatially-resolved, long-slit, echelle spectroscopy drawn from the San Pedro Mártir Kinematic Catalogue of PNe † , we characterized the kinematics of PNe shells measuring their global expansion velocities. We present here a brief summary of these observational results, with a focus on our most recent study of about 26 PNe with low metallicity that appear to derive from progenitor stars of the lowest masses (including the halo PNe population). Low expansion velocities were found for these nebulae, less than 20 km s−1, which are most likely associated with a weak central star wind driving the kinematics of the nebular shell in this particular population.

Among the solar proxies, κ1 Cet, stands out as potentially having a mass very close to solar and a young age. We report magnetic field measurements and planetary habitability consequences around this star, a proxy of the young Sun when life arose on Earth. Magnetic strength was determined from spectropolarimetric observations and we reconstruct the large-scale surface magnetic field to derive the magnetic environment, stellar winds, and particle flux permeating the interplanetary medium around κ1 Cet. Our results show a closer magnetosphere and mass-loss rate 50 times larger than the current solar wind mass-loss rate when Life arose on Earth, resulting in a larger interaction via space weather disturbances between the stellar wind and a hypothetical young-Earth analogue, potentially affecting the habitability. Interaction of the wind from the young Sun with the planetary ancient magnetic field may have affected the young Earth and its life conditions.

The existence of multiple subclasses of type Ia supernovae (SNeIa) has been the subject of great debate in the last decade. In this work, we show how machine learning tools facilitate identification of subtypes of SNe Ia. Using Deep Learning for dimensionality reduction, we were capable of performing such identification in a parameter space of significantly lower dimension than its principal component analysis counterpart. This is evidence that the progenitor system and the explosion mechanism can be described with a small number of initial physical parameters. All tools used here are publicly available in the Python package DRACULA (Dimensionality Reduction And Clustering for Unsupervised Learning in Astronomy) and can be found within COINtoolbox (https://github.com/COINtoolbox/DRACULA).

Euclid is the ESA M2 mission and a milestone in the understanding of the geometry of the Universe. In total Euclid will produce up to 26 PB per year of observations. The Science Archive Systems (SAS) belongs to the Euclid Archive System (EAS) that sits in the core of the Euclid Science Ground Segment (SGS). The SAS is being built at the ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC), which is responsible for the development and operations of the scientific archives for the Astronomy, Planetary and Heliophysics missions of ESA. The SAS is focused on the needs of the scientific community and is intended to provide access to the most valuable scientific metadata from the Euclid mission. In this paper we describe the architectural design of the system, implementation progress and the main challenges from the data management point of view in the building of the SAS.

The history and current status of the cross-disciplinary fields of astrostatistics and astroinformatics are reviewed. Astronomers need a wide range of statistical methods for both data reduction and science analysis. With the proliferation of high-throughput telescopes, efficient large scale computational methods are also becoming essential. However, astronomers receive only weak training in these fields during their formal education. Interest in the fields is rapidly growing with conferences organized by scholarly societies, textbooks and tutorial workshops, and research studies pushing the frontiers of methodology. R, the premier language of statistical computing, can provide an important software environment for the incorporation of advanced statistical and computational methodology into the astronomical community.

Unknown aspects of the initiation, evolution, and associated phenomena of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), together with their capability of perturbing the fragile technological equilibrium on which nowadays society depends, turn them a compelling subject of study. While space weather forecasts are thus far not able to predict when and where in the Sun will the next CME take place, various CME triggering mechanisms have been proposed, without reaching consensus on which is the predominant one. To improve our knowledge in these respects, we investigate a long-duration active region throughout its life, from birth until decay along five solar rotations, in connection with its production of ejective events. We benefit from the wealth of solar remote-sensing data with improved temporal, spatial, and spectral resolution provided by the ground-breaking space missions STEREO, SDO, and SOHO. During the investigated time interval, which covers the months July – November 2010, the STEREO spacecraft were nearly 180 degrees apart, allowing for the uninterrupted tracking of the active region and its ensuing CMEs. The ejective aspect is examined from multi-viewpoint coronagraphic images, while the dynamics of the active region photospheric magnetic field are inspected by means of SDO/HMI data for specific subintervals of interest. The ultimate goal of this work in progress is to identify common patterns in the ejective aspect that can be connected with the active region characteristics.

The study of chemical abundance gradients can provide essential information on the evolution of disk galaxies. Here I briefly review our current observational knowledge concerning the abundances of the ionized gas (H ii regions and planetary nebulae) in nearby galaxies, and how they inform us about the time evolution of metallicity gradients.

X-ray emission from planetary nebulae (PNe) provides unique insight on the formation and evolution of PNe. Past observations and the ongoing Chandra Planetary Nebulae Survey (ChanPlaNS) provide a consensus on the two types of X-ray emission detected from PNe: extended and compact point-like sources. Extended X-ray emission arises from a shocked “hot bubble” plasma that resides within the nebular shell. Cooler than expected hot bubble plasma temperatures spurred a number of potential solutions with one emerging as the likely dominate process. The origin of X-ray emission from compact sources at the location of the central star is less clear. These sources might arise from one or combinations of the following processes: self-shocking stellar winds, spun-up binary companions, and/or accretion, perhaps from mass transfer, PN fallback, or debris disks. In the discovery phase, X-ray studies of PNe have mainly focused on the origin of the various emission processes. New directions incorporate multi-wavelength observations to study the influence of X-ray emission on the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Determining the demographics of the Galactic planetary nebula (PN) population is an important goal to further our understanding of this intriguing phase of stellar evolution. The Galactic population has more than doubled in number over the last 15 years, particularly from narrowband Hα surveys along the plane. In this review I will summarise these results, with emphasis on the time interval since the last IAU Symposium. These primarily optical surveys are not without their limitations and new surveys for PNe in the infrared similarly face a number of challenges. I will discuss the need for multi-wavelength approaches to discovery and analysis. The desire to have accurate volume-limited samples of Galactic PNe at our disposal is emphasised, which will be impacted with new data from the Gaia satellite mission. We need robust surveys of PNe and their central stars, especially volume-limited surveys, in order to clarify and quantify their evolutionary pathways.

We present infrared two color diagrams (2CDs) for a large sample of AGB stars, post-AGB stars, and planetary nebulae (PNe) to study their spectral evolution in infrared bands. We discuss possible evolutionary tracks from AGB stars to PNe on the 2CDs. We use catalogs from the available literature for the sample of AGB stars, post-AGB stars, and PNe in our Galaxy.

Extreme solar-terrestrial events are those in which very energetic solar ejections hit the earth?s magnetosphere, causing intense energization of the earth?s ring current. Statistically, their occurrence is approximately once per Gleissberg solar cycle (70-100yrs). The solar transient occurred on July, 23rd (2012) was potentially one of such extreme events. The associated coronal mass ejection (CME), however, was not ejected towards the earth. Instead, it hit the STEREO A spacecraft, located 120 degrees away from the Sun-Earth line. Estimates of the geoeffectiveness of such a CME point to a scenario of extreme Space Weather conditions. In terms of the ring current energization, as measured by the Disturbance Storm-Time index (Dst), had this CME hit the Earth, it would have caused the strongest geomagnetic storm in space era.

It is widely accepted that binary interactions are responsible for the shaping of planetary nebula. However, these binary interactions and evolutionary channels are poorly understood. Our recent study revealed a newly discovered population of low-luminosity, low-metallicity, likely binaries in the Magellanic Clouds: dusty post-RGB stars. They are likely to have evolved off the RGB via binary interaction. In this paper we present preliminary results of the first radial velocity monitoring of the post-RGB stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the implications on stellar (binary) evolution. We also investigate their link, if any, to the planetary nebulae systems.

Small-scale kG strong magnetic field elements in the solar photosphere are often identified as so-called magnetic bright points (MBPs). In principle these MBPs represent the cross-section of a vertical, strong, magnetic flux tube which is expanding with height in the solar atmosphere. As these magnetic elements represent possible MHD wave guides, a significant interest has been already paid to them from the viewpoint of observations and simulations. In this work we would like to shed more light on a possible scenario for the creation of such strong magnetic field concentrations. The accepted standard scenario involves the convective collapse process. In this ongoing work we will show indications that this convective collapse process may become triggered by sufficiently strong pressure disturbances. However, it is highly unlikely that p-mode waves can be of such a strength.

We investigate the stellar halo of the nearby elliptical Virgo-cluster galaxy M49 using Planetary Nebulae (PNe). M49 is the second-brightest galaxy of the Virgo cluster and is at the center of the Virgo subcluster B. We present an extended catalogue extracted from a narrow-band survey carried out with Subaru’s Suprime Cam, consisting of 735 PNe down to a limiting magnitude of m 5007 = 29.3. This PNe population traces the halo out to 155 kpc from the galaxy’s center, which provides accurate measurement of the luminosity-specific PN-number (α-parameter) in the inner and outer regions of M49’s halo. We are also able to determine the morphological variation of the planetary nebulae luminosity function (PNLF), that may trace different parent stellar populations. This enables us to identify the transition from the PN-scarce, possibly metal-rich, galaxy halo to the PN-rich, metal-poor, outer component.