The blue continuum of the eclipsing polar UZ For is dominated by single- or double-peaked emission from He ii, He i and the Balmer lines. The red spectrum shows weak emission from the Na i doublet at λ 8183 and 8194 Å and strong emission from the Ca ii lines at λ 8498 and 8542 Å. Doppler tomography of the strongest emission features reveals the presence of emission from the irradiated face of the secondary star, the threading region, and the ballistic and magnetically confined accretion stream. We have obtained 28 new eclipse times of UZ For during 2011–2016 as part of our eclipse timing follow-up programme to test the two-planet model proposed to explain variations in the eclipse times of UZ For.

This talk introduced and described the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), which is a new ground-based transit survey operating at the ESO Paranal Observatory. NGTS has been designed to achieve better photometric precision than previous ground-based surveys; it aims to detect Neptune-sized planets around Sun-like stars, and sub-Neptunes around M dwarfs that are sufficiently bright for radial-velocity confirmation and mass determination. NGTS is also optimised for ground-based follow up of exoplanet candidates from TESS and PLATO. I presented early results from the survey, and described the status of our HARPS radial-velocity and SAAO photometric follow-ups of exoplanet candidates.

Stars are the main ingredients of galaxies, and the sites of the creation of most chemical elements in our universe. The knowledge that we gain from studying nearby resolved stellar populations assists directly our ability to measure the properties of distant galaxies. The overall objective of this project is to study galaxy formation and evolution in a complete environment of the dwarf galaxies in the Local Group, by using the same methods for all of them. For that purpose, we used the INT to conduct a monitoring survey of the majority of Local-Group dwarf galaxies in order to identify the most evolved AGB stars that are long-period variables (LPV). LPV stars reach their maximum brightness amplitudes at optical wavelengths, owing to changes in temperature. They trace stellar populations as young as ∼30 Myr up to as old as ∼10 Gyr, and identifying them is one of the best ways of reconstructing star-formation history using a method that we have developed and applied successfully to other Local-Group galaxies. Since the luminosity variations span 100–1000 days, we planned observations over 10 epochs, spaced ∼3 months apart; 9 epochs of data have so far been obtained.

The Taipan galaxy survey (hereafter simply ‘Taipan’) is a multi-object spectroscopic survey starting in 2017 that will cover 2π steradians over the southern sky (δ ≲ 10°, |b| ≳ 10°), and obtain optical spectra for about two million galaxies out to z < 0.4. Taipan will use the newly refurbished 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope at Siding Spring Observatory with the new TAIPAN instrument, which includes an innovative ‘Starbugs’ positioning system capable of rapidly and simultaneously deploying up to 150 spectroscopic fibres (and up to 300 with a proposed upgrade) over the 6° diameter focal plane, and a purpose-built spectrograph operating in the range from 370 to 870 nm with resolving power R ≳ 2000. The main scientific goals of Taipan are (i) to measure the distance scale of the Universe (primarily governed by the local expansion rate, H 0) to 1% precision, and the growth rate of structure to 5%; (ii) to make the most extensive map yet constructed of the total mass distribution and motions in the local Universe, using peculiar velocities based on improved Fundamental Plane distances, which will enable sensitive tests of gravitational physics; and (iii) to deliver a legacy sample of low-redshift galaxies as a unique laboratory for studying galaxy evolution as a function of dark matter halo and stellar mass and environment. The final survey, which will be completed within 5 yrs, will consist of a complete magnitude-limited sample (i ⩽ 17) of about 1.2 × 106 galaxies supplemented by an extension to higher redshifts and fainter magnitudes (i ⩽ 18.1) of a luminous red galaxy sample of about 0.8 × 106 galaxies. Observations and data processing will be carried out remotely and in a fully automated way, using a purpose-built automated ‘virtual observer’ software and an automated data reduction pipeline. The Taipan survey is deliberately designed to maximise its legacy value by complementing and enhancing current and planned surveys of the southern sky at wavelengths from the optical to the radio; it will become the primary redshift and optical spectroscopic reference catalogue for the local extragalactic Universe in the southern sky for the coming decade.

Understanding the properties of the crust and the core as well as its interface is essential for accurate astrophysical modelling of phenomena such as glitches, X-ray bursts or oscillations in neutron stars. To study the crust–core properties, it is crucial to develop a unified and consistent scheme to describe both the clusterised matter in the crust and homogeneous matter in the core. The low density regime in the neutron star crust is accessible to terrestrial nuclear experiments. In order to develop a consistent description of the crust and the core of neutron stars within the same formalism, we use a density functional scheme, with the model coefficients in homogeneous matter related directly to empirical nuclear observables. In this work, we extend this scheme to non-homogeneous matter to describe nuclei in the crust. We then test this scheme against nuclear observables.

I suggest a novel approach for deriving evolution equations for rapidly rotating relativistic stars affected by radiation-driven Chandrasekhar–Friedman–Schutz instability. This approach is based on the multipolar expansion of gravitational wave emission and appeals to the global physical properties of the star (energy, angular momentum, and thermal state), but not to canonical energy and angular momentum, which is traditional. It leads to simple derivation of the Chandrasekhar–Friedman–Schutz instability criterion for normal modes and the evolution equations for a star, affected by this instability. The approach also gives a precise form to simple explanation of the Chandrasekhar–Friedman–Schutz instability; it occurs when two conditions are met: (a) gravitational wave emission removes angular momentum from the rotating star (thus releasing the rotation energy) and (b) gravitational waves carry less energy, than the released amount of the rotation energy. To illustrate the results, I take the r-mode instability in slowly rotating Newtonian stellar models as an example. It leads to evolution equations, where the emission of gravitational waves directly affects the spin frequency, being in apparent contradiction with widely accepted equations. According to the latter, effective spin frequency decrease is coupled with dissipation of unstable mode, but not with the instability as it is. This problem is shown to be superficial, and arises as a result of specific definition of the effective spin frequency applied previously. Namely, it is shown, that if this definition is taken into account properly, the evolution equations coincide with obtained here in the leading order in mode amplitude. I also argue that the next-to-leading order terms in evolution equations were not yet derived accurately and thus it would be more self-consistent to omit them.

The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) is an 18000 m2 radio telescope located 40 km from Canberra, Australia. Its operating band (820–851 MHz) is partly allocated to telecommunications, making radio astronomy challenging. We describe how the deployment of new digital receivers, Field Programmable Gate Array-based filterbanks, and server-class computers equipped with 43 Graphics Processing Units, has transformed the telescope into a versatile new instrument (UTMOST) for studying the radio sky on millisecond timescales. UTMOST has 10 times the bandwidth and double the field of view compared to the MOST, and voltage record and playback capability has facilitated rapid implementaton of many new observing modes, most of which operate commensally. UTMOST can simultaneously excise interference, make maps, coherently dedisperse pulsars, and perform real-time searches of coherent fan-beams for dispersed single pulses. UTMOST operates as a robotic facility, deciding how to efficiently target pulsars and how long to stay on source via real-time pulsar folding, while searching for single pulse events. Regular timing of over 300 pulsars has yielded seven pulsar glitches and three Fast Radio Bursts during commissioning. UTMOST demonstrates that if sufficient signal processing is applied to voltage streams, innovative science remains possible even in hostile radio frequency environments.

Dark Matter constitutes most of the matter in the presently accepted cosmological model for our Universe. The extreme conditions of ordinary baryonic matter, namely high density and compactness, in Neutron Stars make these objects suitable to gravitationally accrete such a massive component provided interaction strength between both, luminous and dark sectors, at current experimental level of sensitivity. We consider several different DM phenomenological models from the myriad of those presently allowed. In this contribution, we review astrophysical aspects of interest in the interplay of ordinary matter and a fermionic light Dark Matter component. We focus in the interior nuclear medium in the core and external layers, i.e. the crust, discussing the impact of a novel dark sector in relevant stellar quantities for (heat) energy transport such as thermal conductivity or emissivities.

The LIGO/Virgo detections of gravitational waves from merging black holes of ≃ 30 solar mass suggest progenitor stars of low metallicity (Z/Z⊙ ≲ 0.3). In this talk I will provide constrains on where the progenitors of GW150914 and GW170104 may have formed, based on advanced models of galaxy formation and evolution combined with binary population synthesis models. First I will combine estimates of galaxy properties (star-forming gas metallicity, star formation rate and merger rate) across cosmic time to predict the low redshift BBH merger rate as a function of present day host galaxy mass, formation redshift of the progenitor system and different progenitor metallicities. I will show that the signal is dominated by binaries formed at the peak of star formation in massive galaxies with and binaries formed recently in dwarf galaxies. Then, I will present what very high resolution hydrodynamic simulations of different galaxy types can learn us about their black hole populations.

The upcoming radio interferometer Square Kilometre Array is expected to directly detect the redshifted 21-cm signal from the Cosmic Dawn for the first time. In this era temperature fluctuations from X-ray heating of the neutral intergalactic medium can impact this signal dramatically. Previously, in Ross et al. (2017), we presented the first large-volume, 244 h-1 Mpc=349 Mpc a side, fully numerical radiative transfer simulations of X-ray heating. This work is a follow-up where we now also consider QSO-like sources in addition to high mass X-ray binaries. Images of the two cases are clearly distinguishable at SKA1-LOW resolution and have RMS fluctuations above the expected noise. The inclusion of QSOs leads to a dramatic increase in non-Gaussianity of the signal, as measured by the skewness and kurtosis of the 21-cm signal. We conclude that this increased non-Gaussianity is a promising signature of early QSOs.

We present the results of prompt optical follow-up of the electromagnetic counterpart of GW170817 by the Transient Optical Robotic Observatory of the South Collaboration (TOROS). We detected highly significant dimming in the light curves of the counterpart over the course of only 80 minutes of observations obtained ~35 hr after the trigger with the T80-South telescope. A second epoch of observations, obtained ~59 hr after the event with the EABA 1.5m telescope, confirms the fast fading nature of the transient. The observed colors of the counterpart suggest that this event was a “blue kilonova” relatively free of lanthanides.

21-cm cosmology is a powerful new probe of the intergalactic medium at redshifts 20 ≳ z ≳ 6 corresponding to the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization. Current observations of the highly-redshifted 21-cm transition are limited by the dynamic range they can achieve against foreground sources of low-frequency (<200 MHz) of radio emission. We used the Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array (OVRO-LWA) to generate a series of new modern high-fidelity sky maps that capture emission on angular scales ranging from tens of degrees to ∼15 arcmin, and frequencies between 36 and 73 MHz. These sky maps were generated from the application of Tikhonov-regularized m-mode analysis imaging, which is a new interferometric imaging technique that is uniquely suited for low-frequency, wide-field, drift-scanning interferometers.

With current efforts inching closer to detecting the 21-cm signal from the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), proper preparation will require publicly available simulated models of the various forms the signal could take. In this work we present a database of such models, available at 21ssd.obspm.fr. The models are created with a fully-coupled radiative hydrodynamic simulation (LICORICE), and are created at high resolution (10243). We also begin to analyse and explore the possible 21-cm EoR signals (with Power Spectra and Pixel Distribution Functions), and study the effects of thermal noise on our ability to recover the signal out to high redshifts. Finally, we begin to explore the concepts of ‘distance’ between different models, which represents a crucial step towards optimising parameter space sampling, training neural networks, and finally extracting parameter values from observations.

Investigating the distant extragalactic Universe requires a subtraction of the Galactic foreground. One of the major difficulties deriving the fine structure of the galactic foreground is the embedded foreground and background point sources appearing in the given fields. It is especially so in the infrared. We report our study subtracting point sources from Herschel images with Kriging, an interpolation method where the interpolated values are modelled by a Gaussian process governed by prior covariances. Using the Kriging method on Herschel multi-wavelength observations the structure of the Galactic foreground can be studied with much higher resolution than previously, leading to a better foreground subtraction at the end.

A short status update on the LOFAR Epoch of Reionization (EoR) Key Science Project (KSP) is given, regarding data acquisition, data processing and analysis, and current power-spectrum limits on the redshifted 21-cm signal of neutral hydrogen at redshifts z = 8 − 10. With caution, we present a preliminary astrophysical analysis of ∼60 hr of processed LOFAR data and their resulting power spectrum, showing that potentially already interesting limits on X-ray heating during the Cosmic Dawn can already be gained. This is by no means the final analysis of this sub-set of data, but illustrates the future potential when all nearly 3000 hr of data in hand on two EoR windows will have been processed.

We review an improved statistical model of extra-galactic point-source foregrounds first introduced in Murray et al. (2017), in the context of the Epoch of Reionization. This model extends the instrumentally-convolved foreground covariance used in inverse-covariance foreground mitigation schemes, by considering the cosmological clustering of the sources. In this short work, we show that over scales of k ∼ (0.6, 40.)hMpc−1, ignoring source clustering is a valid approximation. This is in contrast to Murray et al. (2017), who found a possibility of false detection if the clustering was ignored. The dominant cause for this change is the introduction of a Galactic synchrotron component which shadows the clustering of sources.

Foreground contamination is one of the most important limiting factors in detecting the neutral hydrogen in the epoch of reionisation. These foregrounds can be roughly split into galactic and extragalactic foregrounds. In these proceedings we highlight information that can be gleaned from multi-wavelength extragalactic surveys in order to overcome this issue. We discuss how clustering information from the lower-redshift, foreground galaxies, can be used as additional information in accounting for the noise associated with the foregrounds. We then go on to highlight the expected contribution of future optical and near-infrared surveys for detecting the galaxies responsible for ionising the Universe. We suggest that these galaxies can also be used to reduce the systematics in the 21-cm epoch of reionisation signal through cross-correlations if enough common area is surveyed.

AGILE is a space mission of the Italian Space Agency dedicated to γ-ray astrophysics, launched in 2007. AGILE performed dedicated real-time searches for possible γ-ray counterparts of gravitational wave (GW) events detected by the LIGO-Virgo scientific Collaboration (LVC) during the O2 observation run. We present a review of AGILE observations of GW events, starting with the first, GW150914, which was a test case for future searches. We focus here on the main characteristics of the observations of the most important GW events detected in 2017, i.e. GW170104 and GW170817. In particular, for the former event we published γ-ray upper limits (ULs) in the 50 MeV – 10 GeV energy band together with a detailed analysis of a candidate precursor event in the Mini-Calorimeter data. As for GW170817, we published a set of constraining γ-ray ULs obtained for integrations preceding and following the event time. These results allow us to establish important constraints on the γ-ray emission from a possible magnetar-like remnant in the first ~1000 s following T0. AGILE is a major player in the search of electromagnetic counterparts of GW events, and its enhanced detection capabilities in hard X-ray/MeV/GeV ranges will play a crucial role in the future O3 observing run.

In the last decade, it has become clear that the dust-enshrouded star formation contributes significantly to early galaxy evolution. Detection of dust is therefore essential in determining the properties of galaxies in the high-redshift universe. This requires observations at the (sub-)millimeter wavelengths. Unfortunately, sensitivity and background confusion of single dish observations on the one hand, and mapping efficiency of interferometers on the other hand, pose unique challenges to observers. One promising route to overcome these difficulties is intensity mapping of fluctuations which exploits the confusion-limited regime and measures the collective light emission from all sources, including unresolved faint galaxies. We discuss in this contribution how 2D and 3D intensity mapping can measure the dusty star formation at high redshift, through the Cosmic Infrared Background (2D) and [CII] fine structure transition (3D) anisotropies.

The cross power spectrum of the 21 cm signal and Lyman-α emitters (LAEs) is a probe of the Epoch of Reionization. Astrophysical foregrounds do not correlate with the LAE distribution, though the foregrounds contribute to the error. To study the impact of foregrounds on the measurement, we assume realistic observation by the Murchison Widefield Array using a catalogue of radio galaxies, a LAE survey by the Subaru Hyper Supreme-Cam and the redshift of LAEs is determined by the Prime Focus Spectrograph. The HI distribution is estimated from a radiative transfer simulation with models based on results of radiation hydrodynamics simulation. Using these models, we found that the error of cross power spectrum is dominated by foreground terms. Furthermore, we estimate the effects of foreground removal, and find 99% of the foreground removal is required to detect the 21 cm-LAE signal at k ∼ 0.4 h Mpc−1.