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Achille Nucita

Publications and source records attributed to Achille Nucita.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

Revisiting a Quasar Microlensing Event Towards AGN~J1249+3449

The gravitational wave event GW190521 seems to be the only BH merger event possibly correlated with an electromagnetic counterpart, which appeared about 34 days after the GW event. This work aims to confirm that the electromagnetic bump towards the Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) J1249+3449 can be explained within the framework of the gravitational microlensing phenomenon. In particular, considering the data of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), what emerges from a detailed analysis of the observed light curve using three fitting models (Point Source Point Lens, Finite Source Point Lens, Uniform Source Binary Lens) is that the optical bump can be explained as a microlensing event caused by a lens with mass {$\sim\,$0.1 $M_{\odot}$}, lying in the host galaxy of the AGN in question.}

astro-ph.HE↗

VST-SMASH: the VST Survey of Mass Assembly and Structural Hierarchy

The VLT Survey Telescope Survey of Mass Assembly and Structural Hierarchy (VST-SMASH) aims to detect tidal features and remnants around very nearby galaxies, a unique and essential diagnostic of the hierarchical nature of galaxy formation. Leveraging optimal sky conditions at ESO's Paranal Observatory, combined with the VST's multi-band optical filters, VST-SMASH aims to be the definitive survey of stellar streams and tidal remnants in the Local Volume, targeting a low surface-brightness limit of $μ\sim$ 30 mag arcsec$^{-2}$ in the g and r bands, and $μ\sim$ 28 mag arcsec$^{-2}$ in the i band, in a volume-limited sample of local galaxies within 11 Mpc and the Euclid footprint.

astro-ph.GA↗

Euclid-Roman joint microlensing survey: early mass measurement, free floating planets and exomoons

As the Kepler mission has done for hot exoplanets, the ESA Euclid and NASA Roman missions have the potential to create a breakthrough in our understanding of the demographics of cool exoplanets, including unbound, or "free-floating", planets (FFPs). In this study, we demonstrate the complementarity of the two missions and propose two joint-surveys to better constrain the mass and distance of microlensing events. We first demonstrate that an early brief Euclid survey (7 h) of the Roman microlensing fields will allow the measurement of a large fraction of events relative proper motions and lens magnitudes. Then, we study the potential of simultaneous observations by Roman and Euclid to enable the measurement of the microlensing parallax for the shortest microlensing events. Using detailed simulations of the joint detection yield we show that within one year Roman-Euclid observations will be at least an order of magnitude more sensitive than current ground-based measurements. Depending on the exact distribution of FFP, a joint Roman-Euclid campaign should detect around 130 FFP events within a year, including 110 with measured parallax that strongly constrain the FFP mass, and around 30 FFP events with direct mass and distance measurements. The ability of the joint survey to completely break the microlens mass-distance-velocity degeneracy for a significant subset of events provides a unique opportunity to verify unambiguously the FFP hypothesis or else place abundance limits for FFPs between Earth and Jupiter masses that are up to two orders of magnitude stronger than provided by ground-based surveys. Finally, we study the capabilities of the joint survey to enhance the detection and charcterization of exomoons, and found that it could lead to the detection of the first exomoon.

astro-ph.EP↗

Including Millisecond Pulsars inside the Core of Globular Clusters in Pulsar Timing Arrays

We suggest the possibility of including millisecond pulsars inside the core of globular clusters in pulsar timing array experiments. Since they are very close to each other, their gravitational wave induced timing residuals are expected to be almost the same, because both the Earth and the pulsar terms are correlated. We simulate the expected timing residuals, due to the gravitational wave signal emitted by a uniform supermassive black-hole binary population, on the millisecond pulsars inside a globular cluster core. In this respect, Terzan 5 has been adopted as a globular cluster prototype and, in our simulations, we adopted similar distance, core radius, and number of millisecond pulsars contained in it. Our results show that the presence of a strong correlation between the timing residuals of the globular cluster core millisecond pulsars can provide a remarkable gravitational wave signature. This result can be therefore exploited for the detection of gravitational waves through pulsar timing, especially in conjunction with the standard cross-correlation search carried out by the pulsar timing array collaborations.

astro-ph.GA↗

Timing analysis in microlensing

Timing analysis is a powerful tool used to determine periodic features of physical phenomena. Here we review two applications of timing analysis to gravitational microlensing events. The first one, in particular cases, allows the estimation of the orbital period of binary lenses, which in turn enables the breaking of degeneracies. The second one is a method to measure the rotation period of the lensed star by observing signatures due to stellar spots on its surface.

astro-ph.SR↗

The Scales of Gravitational Lensing

After exactly a century since the formulation of the general theory of relativity, the phenomenon of gravitational lensing is still an extremely powerful method for investigating in astrophysics and cosmology. Indeed, it is adopted to study the distribution of the stellar component in the Milky Way, to study dark matter and dark energy on very large scales and even to discover exoplanets. Moreover, thanks to technological developments, it will allow the measure of the physical parameters (mass, angular momentum and electric charge) of supermassive black holes in the center of ours and nearby galaxies.

astro-ph.CO↗

Periastron shift in Weyl class spacetimes

The periastron position advance for geodesic motion in axially symmetric solutions of the Einstein field equations belonging to the Weyl class of vacuum solutions is investigated. Explicit examples corresponding to either static solutions (single Chazy-Curzon, Schwarzschild and a pair of them), or stationary solution (single rotating Chazy-Curzon and Kerr black hole) are discussed. The results are then applied to the case of S2-SgrA$^*$ binary system of which the periastron position advance will be soon measured with a great accuracy.

gr-qc↗