On 1975 August 22 an outburst above the west limb of the Sun was observed with the Culgoora radioheliograph at 43, 80 and 160 MHz. The first stages of the event included intense type III/V bursts followed by a type II burst with multiple, fundamental and harmonic bands and herringbone structure. While the type II burst was still in progress a moving type IV burst appeared. It was eventually observed out to a distance of more than 3 R⊙. This was the first moving type IV burst observed with the two-dimensional radioheliograph operating at three frequencies; as such it provides valuable constraints on models of moving type IV sources.

This study depends on KIC 9641031 eclipsing binary with a chromospherically active component. There are three type variations, such as geometrical variations due to eclipses, sinusoidal variations due to the rotational modulations, and also flares, in the light curves. Taking into account results obtained from observations in the Kepler Mission Database, we discuss the details of chromospheric activity. The sinusoidal light variations due to rotational modulation and the flare events were modelled. 92 different data subsets separated using the analytic models were modelled separately to obtain the cool spot configuration. Acording to the model, there are two active regions separated by about 180° longitudinally between the latitudes of +50° and +100°. 240 flares, whose parameters were computed, were detected. Using these parameters, the OPEA model was derived, in which the Plateau value was found to be 1.232±0.069 s, and half-life parameter was found as 2291.7 s. The flare frequency N1 was found as 0.41632 h−1, while the flare frequency N2 was found as 0.00027. Considering these parameters together with the orbital period variations demonstrates that the period variations depend on chromospheric activity. Comparing the system with its analogue, the activity level of KIC 9641031 is remarkably lower than the others.

We applied three statistical classification techniques—linear discriminant analysis (LDA), logistic regression, and random forests—to three astronomical datasets associated with searches for interstellar masers. We compared the performance of these methods in identifying whether specific mid-infrared or millimetre continuum sources are likely to have associated interstellar masers. We also discuss the interpretability of the results of each classification technique. Non-parametric methods have the potential to make accurate predictions when there are complex relationships between critical parameters. We found that for the small datasets the parametric methods logistic regression and LDA performed best, for the largest dataset the non-parametric method of random forests performed with comparable accuracy to parametric techniques, rather than any significant improvement. This suggests that at least for the specific examples investigated here accuracy of the predictions obtained is not being limited by the use of parametric models. We also found that for LDA, transformation of the data to match a normal distribution led to a significant improvement in accuracy. The different classification techniques had significant overlap in their predictions; further astronomical observations will enable the accuracy of these predictions to be tested.

Here, we derive a Parker-wind-like solution for a stratified, plane-parallel atmosphere undergoing photoionisation. The difference compared to the standard Parker solar wind is that the sonic point is crossed only at infinity. The simplicity of the analytic solution makes it a convenient test problem for numerical simulations of photoevaporation in protoplanetary discs.

Resolved observations are bringing new constraints on the origin of radial gaps in protoplanetary disks. The kinematics, sampled in detail in one case-study, are indicative of non-Keplerian flows, corresponding to warped structures and accretion which may both play a role in the development of cavities. Disk asymmetries seen in the radio continuum are being interpreted in the context of dust segregation via aerodynamic trapping. We summarise recent observational progress, and describe prospects for improvements in the near term.

It is quite likely that self-gravity will play an important role in the evolution of accretion discs, in particular, those around young stars, and those around supermassive black holes. We summarise, here, our current understanding of the evolution of such discs, focussing more on discs in young stellar system, than on discs in active galactic nuclei. We consider the conditions under which such discs may fragment to form bound objects, and when they might, instead, be expected to settle into a quasi-steady, self-regulated state. We also discuss how this understanding may depend on the mass of the disc relative to the mass of the central object, and how it might depend on the presence of external irradiation. Additionally, we consider whether or not fragmentation might be stochastic, where we might expect it to occur in an actual protostellar disc, and if there is any evidence for fragmentation actually playing a role in the formation of planetary-mass bodies. Although there are still a number of outstanding issue, such as the convergence of simulations of self-gravitating discs, whether or not there is more than one mode of fragmentation, and quite what role self-gravitating discs may play in the planet-formation process, our general understanding of these systems seems quite robust.

The magnetic field plays a central role in the formation and evolution of circumstellar disks. The magnetic field connects the rapidly rotating central region with the outer envelope and extracts angular momentum from the central region during gravitational collapse of the cloud core. This process is known as magnetic braking. Both analytical and multidimensional simulations have shown that disk formation is strongly suppressed by magnetic braking in moderately magnetised cloud cores in the ideal magnetohydrodynamic limit. On the other hand, recent observations have provided growing evidence of a relatively large disk several tens of astronomical units in size existing in some Class 0 young stellar objects. This introduces a serious discrepancy between the theoretical study and observations. Various physical mechanisms have been proposed to solve the problem of catastrophic magnetic braking, such as misalignment between the magnetic field and the rotation axis, turbulence, and non-ideal effect. In this paper, we review the mechanism of magnetic braking, its effect on disk formation and early evolution, and the mechanisms that resolve the magnetic braking problem. In particular, we emphasise the importance of non-ideal effects. The combination of magnetic diffusion and thermal evolution during gravitational collapse provides a robust formation process for the circumstellar disk at the very early phase of protostar formation. The rotation induced by the Hall effect can supply a sufficient amount of angular momentum for typical circumstellar disks around T Tauri stars. By examining the combination of the suggested mechanisms, we conclude that the circumstellar disks commonly form in the very early phase of protostar formation.

An exciting new theoretical result shows that observing suppression of dipole oscillation modes in red giant stars can be used to detect strong magnetic fields in the stellar cores. A fundamental facet of the theory is that nearly all the mode energy leaking into the core is trapped by the magnetic greenhouse effect. This results in clear predictions for how the mode visibility changes as a star evolves up the red giant branch, and how that depends on stellar mass, spherical degree, and mode lifetime. Here, we investigate the validity of these predictions with a focus on the visibility of different spherical degrees. We find that mode suppression weakens for higher degree modes with a reduction in the quadrupole mode visibility of up to 49%, and no detectable suppression of octupole modes, in agreement with theory. We find evidence for the influence of increasing mode lifetimes on the visibilities along the red giant branch, in agreement with previous independent observations. These results support the theory that strong internal magnetic fields cause suppression of non-radial modes in red giants. We also find preliminary evidence that stars with suppressed dipole modes on average have slightly lower metallicity than normal stars.

Black hole mass is a key factor in determining how a black hole interacts with its environment. However, the determination of black hole masses at high redshifts depends on secondary mass estimators, which are based on empirical relationships and broad approximations. A dynamical disk wind broad line region model (BLR) of active galactic nuclei is built in order to test the impact of different BLR geometries and inclination angles on the black hole mass estimation. Monte Carlo simulations of two disk wind models are constructed to recover the virial scale factor, f, at various inclination angles. The resulting f values strongly correlate with inclination angle, with large f values associated with small inclination angles (close to face-on) and small f values with large inclination angles (close to edge-on). The recovered f factors are consistent with previously determined f values, found from empirical relationships. Setting f as a constant may introduce a bias into virial black hole mass estimates for a large sample of active galactic nuclei. However, the extent of the bias depends on the line width characterisation (e.g. full width at half maximum or line dispersion). Masses estimated using $f_{\text{FWHM}}$ tend to be biased towards larger masses, but this can generally be corrected by calibrating for the width or shape of the emission line.

The Kunlun Infrared Sky Survey will be the first comprehensive exploration of the time varying Universe in the infrared. A key feature in optimising the scientific yield of this ambitious research programme is the choice of the survey passband. In particular, the survey aims to maximally exploit the unique thermal and atmospheric conditions pertaining to the high Antarctic site. By simulating the expected signal-to-noise for varying filter properties within the so-called ‘K DARK’ 2.4 μm window, filter performance can be tuned and best-case designs are given covering a range of conditions.

With detections of quasars powered by increasingly massive black holes at increasingly early times in cosmic history over the past decade, there has been correspondingly rapid progress made on the theory of early black hole formation and growth. Here, we review the emerging picture of how the first massive black holes formed from the primordial gas and then grew to supermassive scales. We discuss the initial conditions for the formation of the progenitors of these seed black holes, the factors dictating the initial masses with which they form, and their initial stages of growth via accretion, which may occur at super-Eddington rates. Finally, we briefly discuss how these results connect to large-scale simulations of the growth of supermassive black holes in the first billion years after the Big Bang.

We have used integral field spectroscopy of a sample of six nearby (z ~ 0.01–0.04) high star-formation rate ( $\text{SFR} \sim 10\hbox{--}40$ $\text{M}_\odot \text{ yr$^{-1}$}$ ) galaxies to investigate the relationship between local velocity dispersion and star-formation rate on sub-galactic scales. The low-redshift mitigates, to some extent, the effect of beam smearing which artificially inflates the measured dispersion as it combines regions with different line-of-sight velocities into a single spatial pixel. We compare the parametric maps of the velocity dispersion with the Hα flux (a proxy for local star-formation rate), and the velocity gradient (a proxy for the local effect of beam smearing). We find, even for these very nearby galaxies, the Hα velocity dispersion correlates more strongly with velocity gradient than with Hα flux—implying that beam smearing is still having a significant effect on the velocity dispersion measurements. We obtain a first-order non parametric correction for the unweighted and flux weighted mean velocity dispersion by fitting a 2D linear regression model to the spaxel-by-spaxel data where the velocity gradient and the Hα flux are the independent variables and the velocity dispersion is the dependent variable; and then extrapolating to zero velocity gradient. The corrected velocity dispersions are a factor of ~ 1.3–4.5 and ~ 1.3–2.7 lower than the uncorrected flux-weighted and unweighted mean line-of-sight velocity dispersion values, respectively. These corrections are larger than has been previously cited using disc models of the velocity and velocity dispersion field to correct for beam smearing. The corrected flux-weighted velocity dispersion values are σm ~ 20–50 km s−1.

Due to their low masses dwarf galaxies experience low star-formation rates resulting in stellar cluster masses insufficient to fill the initial mass function (IMF) to the uppermost mass. Numerical simulations usually do not account for the completeness of the IMF, but treat a filed IMF by numbers, masses, and stellar feedback by fractions. To ensure that only entire stars are formed, we consider an IMF filled from the lower-mass regime and truncated where at least one entire massive star is formed.

By 3D simulations we investigate the effects of two possible IMFs on the evolution of dwarf galaxies: filled vs. truncated IMF. For the truncated IMF the star-formation self-regulation is suppressed, while the energy release by typeII supernovae is larger, both compared to the filled IMF. Moreover, the abundance ratios of particular elements yielded from massive and intermediate-mass stars differ significantly between the two IMF distributions.

Current data broadly support trends of galaxy surface brightness profile amplitude and shape with total stellar mass predicted by state-of-the-art ΛCDM cosmological simulations, although recent results show signs of interesting discrepancies, particularly for galaxies less massive than the Milky Way. Here I discuss how perhaps the largest contribution to such discrepancies can be inferred almost directly from how well a given model agrees with the observed present-day galaxy stellar mass function.

Molecular gas has still only been detected beyond the R25 radius in a few galaxies. Is this due to the low H2 content or to the difficulty of using Carbon Monoxide (CO) to trace H2? Similarly, star formation (SF) decreases sharply in the outer disks of spirals although HI is often plentiful; is the decrease in SF because there is little H2 or because the SF is very inefficient in the outer disk environment?

Existing observations suggest that while outer disk clouds tend to be smaller (steeper mass function), their CO brightness temperature is only slightly lower than in the inner disk, at least when observed with sufficiently high angular resolution. In near-solar metallicity galaxies (Z ⩾ 0.5Zsol ), the CO does not become intrinsically difficult to detect when H2 is present, even in the outer disk. While more observations of CO or other means of tracing H2 in the outer disks are necessary, current data tend to show that the SF rate per unit H2 remains approximately constant with galactocentric distance, indicating that the star formation proceeds normally but the transformation of HI into H2 is very slow in the outer disk.

Understanding stellar birth requires observations of the clouds in which they form. These clouds are dense and self-gravitating, and in all existing observations, they are molecular with H2 the dominant species and CO the best available. When the abundances of carbon and oxygen are low compared to hydrogen, and the opacity from dust is also low, as in primeval galaxies and local dwarf irregular galaxies CO forms slowly and is easily destroyed, so it cannot accumulate inside dense clouds. Then we lose our ability to trace the gas in regions of star formation and we lose critical information on the temperatures, densities, and velocities of the material that collapses. I will report on high resolution observations with ALMA of CO clouds in the local group dwarf irregular galaxy WLM, which has a metallicity that is 13% of the solar value and 50% lower than the previous CO detection threshold and the properties derived of very small dense CO clouds mapped..

Disk galaxies in cosmological numerical simulations grow by accreting gas from the cosmic web. This gas reaches the external disk, and then spirals in dragged along by tidal forces and/or disk instabilities. The importance of gas infall is as clear from numerical simulations as it is obscure to observations. Extremely metal poor (XMP) galaxies seem to be the best example we have of the gas accretion process at work. They have large off-center starbursts which show significant metallicity drop compared with the host galaxy. This observation is naturally explained as a gas accretion event caught in the act. We present preliminary results of the kinematical properties of the metal poor starbursts in XMPs, which suggest that the starbursts are kinematically decoupled entities within the host galaxy.

The HI in galaxies often extends past their conventionally defined optical extent. I report results from our team which has been probing low intensity star formation in outer disks using imaging in Hα and ultraviolet. Using a sample of hundreds of HI selected galaxies, we confirm that outer disk HII regions and extended UV disks are common. Hence outer disks are not dormant but are dimly forming stars. Although the ultraviolet light in galaxies is more centrally concentrated than the HI, the UV/HI ratio (the Star Formation Efficiency) is nearly constant, with a slight dependency on surface brightness. This result is well accounted for in a model where disks maintain a constant stability parameter Q. This model also accounts for how the ISM and star formation are distributed in the bright parts of galaxies, and how HI appears to trace the distribution of dark matter in galaxy outskirts.

The stellar kinematics of the discs of S0 galaxies (as obtained using planetary nebulae, PNe, and integrated stellar light data) is comparable to that of spiral galaxies, with similar flat rotation curves and falling velocity dispersion profiles, but they present a larger amount of random motions. The only other tracer available to probe the kinematics of individual early-type galaxies are globular clusters (GCs). GCs’ formation is intimately connected to a galaxy major star forming event(s) and GCs are, therefore, good proofs of galaxy formation histories. We directly compare a sample of PNe, GCs, and stellar velocities out to 4 effective radii, in the S0 galaxies NGC 2768 and NGC 1023. In particular, we test a new method for studying GC properties and we find that these two lenticular galaxies are consistent with being formed through different formation mechanisms.

We revisit the well known H i size-mass relation of galaxies with an unprecedented large sample of over 500 galaxies (Wang et al. 2016). We find that the relation and the scatter about the relation do not depend on the galaxy type, optical luminosity or H i richness. It indicates a fundamental unrecognised mechanism that drives the distribution of H i in different galaxies.