arXiv subjects

Bin Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Bin Ma.

124 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Exoplanets in the Antarctic sky. II. 116 Transiting Exoplanet Candidates Found by AST3-II (CHESPA) within the Southern CVZ of TESS

We report first results from the CHinese Exoplanet Searching Program from Antarctica (CHESPA)---a wide-field high-resolution photometric survey for transiting exoplanets carried out using telescopes of the AST3 (Antarctic Survey Telescopes times 3) project. There are now three telescopes (AST3-I, AST3-II, and CSTAR-II) operating at Dome A---the highest point on the Antarctic Plateau---in a fully automatic and remote mode to exploit the superb observing conditions of the site, and its long and uninterrupted polar nights. The search for transiting exoplanets is one of the key projects for AST3. During the Austral winters of 2016 and 2017 we used the AST3-II telescope to survey a set of target fields near the southern ecliptic pole, falling within the continuous viewing zone of the TESS mission \citep{Ricker10}. The first data release of the 2016 data, including images, catalogs and lightcurves of 26578 bright stars ($7.5\le i \le15$) was presented in \citet{Zhang18}. The best precision, as measured by the RMS of the lightcurves at the optimum magnitude of the survey ($i=10$), is around 2\,mmag. We detect 222 objects with plausible transit signals from these data, 116 of which are plausible transiting exoplanet candidates according to their stellar properties as given by the TESS Input Catalog \citep{Stassun17}, Gaia DR2 \citep{Gaia18} and TESS-HERMES spectroscopy \citep{Sharma18}. With the first data release from TESS expected in late 2018, this candidate list will be a timely for improving the rejection of potential false positives.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2018

Exoplanets in the Antarctic Sky. I. The First Data Release of AST3-II (CHESPA) and New Found Variables within the Southern CVZ of TESS

Located at Dome A, the highest point of the Antarctic plateau, the Chinese Kunlun station is considered to be one of the best ground-based photometric sites because of its extremely cold, dry, and stable atmosphere(Saunders et al. 2009). A target can be monitored from there for over 40 days without diurnal interruption during a polar winter. This makes Kunlun station a perfect site to search for short-period transiting exoplanets. Since 2008, an observatory has been built at Kunlun station and three telescopes are working there. Using these telescopes, the AST3 project has been carried out over the last six years with a search for transiting exoplanets as one of its key programs (CHESPA). In the austral winters of 2016 and 2017, a set of target fields in the Southern CVZ of TESS (Ricker et al. 2009) were monitored by the AST3-II telescope. In this paper, we introduce the CHESPA and present the first data release containing photometry of 26,578 bright stars (m_i < 15). The best photometric precision at the optimum magnitude for the survey is around 2 mmag. To demonstrate the data quality, we also present a catalog of 221 variables with a brightness variation greater than 5 mmag from the 2016 data. Among these variables, 179 are newly identified periodic variables not listed in the AAVSO databasea), and 67 are listed in the Candidate Target List(Stassun et al. 2017). These variables will require careful attention to avoid false-positive signals when searching for transiting exoplanets. Dozens of new transiting exoplanet candidates will be also released in a subsequent paper(Zhang et al. 2018b).

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2018

Meteorological data from KLAWS-2G for an astronomical site survey of Dome A, Antarctica

We present an analysis of meteorological data from the second generation of the Kunlun Automated Weather Station (KLAWS-2G) at Dome A, Antarctica during 2015 and 2016. We find that a strong temperature inversion exists for all the elevations up to 14 m that KLAWS-2G can reach, and lasts for more than 10 hours for 50% or more of the time when temperature inversion occurs. The average wind speeds at 4 m elevation are 4.2 m/s and 3.8 m/s during 2015 and 2016, respectively. The strong temperature inversion and moderate wind speed lead to a shallow turbulent boundary layer height at Dome A. By analyzing the temperature and wind shear profiles, we note telescopes should be elevated by at least 8 m above the ice. We also find that the duration of temperature inversions, and the wind speed, vary considerably from year to year. Therefore, long-term and continuous data are still needed for the site survey at Dome A.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2018

Learning Acoustic Word Embeddings with Temporal Context for Query-by-Example Speech Search

We propose to learn acoustic word embeddings with temporal context for query-by-example (QbE) speech search. The temporal context includes the leading and trailing word sequences of a word. We assume that there exist spoken word pairs in the training database. We pad the word pairs with their original temporal context to form fixed-length speech segment pairs. We obtain the acoustic word embeddings through a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) which is trained on the speech segment pairs with a triplet loss. Shifting a fixed-length analysis window through the search content, we obtain a running sequence of embeddings. In this way, searching for the spoken query is equivalent to the matching of acoustic word embeddings. The experiments show that our proposed acoustic word embeddings learned with temporal context are effective in QbE speech search. They outperform the state-of-the-art frame-level feature representations and reduce run-time computation since no dynamic time warping is required in QbE speech search. We also find that it is important to have sufficient speech segment pairs to train the deep CNN for effective acoustic word embeddings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

The First Release of the AST3-1 Point Source Catalogue from Dome A, Antarctica

The three Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) aim to carry out time domain imaging survey at Dome A, Antarctica. The first of the three telescopes (AST3-1) was successfully deployed on January 2012. AST3-1 is a 500\,mm aperture modified Schmidt telescope with a 680\,mm diameter primary mirror. AST3-1 is equipped with a SDSS $i$ filter and a 10k $\times$ 10k frame transfer CCD camera, reduced to 5k $\times$ 10k by electronic shuttering, resulting in a 4.3 deg$^2$ field-of-view. To verify the capability of AST3-1 for a variety of science goals, extensive commissioning was carried out between March and May 2012. The commissioning included a survey covering 2000 deg$^2$ as well as the entire Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Frequent repeated images were made of the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a selected exoplanet transit field, and fields including some Wolf-Rayet stars. Here we present the data reduction and photometric measurements of the point sources observed by AST3-1. We have achieved a survey depth of 19.3\,mag in 60 s exposures with 5\,mmag precision in the light curves of bright stars. The facility achieves sub-mmag photometric precision under stable survey conditions, approaching its photon noise limit. These results demonstrate that AST3-1 at Dome A is extraordinarily competitive in time-domain astronomy, including both quick searches for faint transients and the detection of tiny transit signals.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2017

Optical Observations of LIGO Source GW 170817 by the Antarctic Survey Telescopes at Dome A, Antarctica

The LIGO detection of gravitational waves (GW) from merging black holes in 2015 marked the beginning of a new era in observational astronomy. The detection of an electromagnetic signal from a GW source is the critical next step to explore in detail the physics involved. The Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3), located at Dome A, Antarctica, is uniquely situated for rapid response time-domain astronomy with its continuous night-time coverage during the austral winter. We report optical observations of the GW source (GW~170817) in the nearby galaxy NGC 4993 using AST3. The data show a rapidly fading transient at around 1 day after the GW trigger, with the $i$-band magnitude declining from $17.23\pm0.13$ magnitude to $17.72\pm0.09$ magnitude in $\sim 1.8$ hour. The brightness and time evolution of the optical transient associated with GW~170817 are broadly consistent with the predictions of models involving merging binary neutron stars. We infer from our data that the merging process ejected about $\sim 10^{-2}$ solar mass of radioactive material at a speed of up to $30\%$ the speed of light.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2017

Variable Stars Observed in the Galactic Disk by AST3-1 from Dome A, Antarctica

AST3-1 is the second-generation wide-field optical photometric telescope dedicated to time domain astronomy at Dome A, Antarctica. Here we present the results of $i$ band images survey from AST3-1 towards one Galactic disk field. Based on time-series photometry of 92,583 stars, 560 variable stars were detected with $i$ magnitude $\leq$ 16.5 mag during eight days of observations; 339 of these are previously unknown variables. We tentatively classify the 560 variables as 285 eclipsing binaries (EW, EB, EA), 27 pulsating variable stars ($δ$~Scuti, $γ$~Doradus, $δ$~Cephei variable and RR Lyrae stars) and 248 other types of variables (unclassified periodic, multi-periodic and aperiodic variable stars). Among the eclipsing binaries, 34 show O'Connell effects. One of the aperiodic variables shows a plateau light curve and another one shows a secondary maximum after peak brightness. We also detected a complex binary system with RS CVn-like light curve morphology; this object is being followed-up spectroscopically using the Gemini South telescope.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2016

Fantastic 4 system for NIST 2015 Language Recognition Evaluation

This article describes the systems jointly submitted by Institute for Infocomm (I$^2$R), the Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université du Maine (LIUM), Nanyang Technology University (NTU) and the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) for 2015 NIST Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE). The submitted system is a fusion of nine sub-systems based on i-vectors extracted from different types of features. Given the i-vectors, several classifiers are adopted for the language detection task including support vector machines (SVM), multi-class logistic regression (MCLR), Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis (PLDA) and Deep Neural Networks (DNN).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2014

Meteorological data for the astronomical site at Dome A, Antarctica

We present an analysis of the meteorological data collected at Dome A, Antarctica by the Kunlun Automated Weather Station, including temperatures and wind speeds at eight elevations above the snow surface between 0m and 14.5m. The average temperatures at 2m and 14.5m are $-54^{\circ}$C and $-46^{\circ}$C, respectively. We find that a strong temperature inversion existed at all heights for more than 70% of the time, and the temperature inversion typically lasts longer than 25 hours, indicating an extremely stable atmosphere. The temperature gradient is larger at lower elevations than higher elevations. The average wind speed was 1.5m/s at 4m elevation. We find that the temperature inversion is stronger when the wind speed is lower and the temperature gradient decreases sharply at a specific wind speed for each elevation. The strong temperature inversion and low wind speed results in a shallow and stable boundary layer with weak atmospheric turbulence above it, suggesting that Dome A should be an excellent site for astronomical observations. All the data from the weather station are available for download.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2014

A new method of CCD dark current correction via extracting the dark information from scientific images

We have developed a new method to correct dark current at relatively high temperatures for Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) images when dark frames cannot be obtained on the telescope. For images taken with the Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) in 2012, due to the low cooling efficiency, the median CCD temperature was -46$^\circ$C, resulting in a high dark current level of about 3$e^-$/pix/sec, even comparable to the sky brightness (10$e^-$/pix/sec). If not corrected, the nonuniformity of the dark current could even overweight the photon noise of the sky background. However, dark frames could not be obtained during the observing season because the camera was operated in frame-transfer mode without a shutter, and the telescope was unattended in winter. Here we present an alternative, but simple and effective method to derive the dark current frame from the scientific images. Then we can scale this dark frame to the temperature at which the scientific images were taken, and apply the dark frame corrections to the scientific images. We have applied this method to the AST3 data, and demonstrated that it can reduce the noise to a level roughly as low as the photon noise of the sky brightness, solving the high noise problem and improving the photometric precision. This method will also be helpful for other projects that suffer from similar issues.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2014

The nonlinear photon transfer curve of CCDs and its effects on photometry

The photon transfer curve (PTC, variance vs. signal level) is a commonly used and effective tool in characterizing CCD performance. It is theoretically linear in the range where photon shot noise dominates, and its slope is utilized to derive the gain of the CCD. However, recent researches on different CCDs have revealed that the variance progressively drops at high signal levels, while the linearity shown by signal versus exposure time is still excellent and unaffected. On the other hand, bright stars are found to exhibit fatter point spread function (PSF). Both nonlinear PTC and the brighter-fatter effect are regarded as the result of spreading of charges between pixels, an interaction progress increasing with signal level. In this work we investigate the nonlinear PTC based on the images with a STA1600FT CCD camera, whose PTC starts to become nonlinear at about 1/3 full well. To explain the phenomenon, we present a model to characterize the charge-sharing PSF. This signal-dependent PSF can be derived from flat-field frames, and allow us to quantify the effects on photometry and measured shape of stars. This effect is essentially critical for projects requiring accurate photometry and shape parameters.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2014

Problems with twilight/supersky flat-field for wide-field robotic telescopes and the solution

Twilight/night sky images are often used for flat-fielding CCD images, but the brightness gradient in twilight/night sky causes problems of accurate flat-field correction in astronomical images for wide-field telescopes. Using data from the Antarctic Survey Telescope (AST3), we found that when the sky brightness gradient is minimum and stable, there is still a gradient of 1% across AST3's field-of-view of 4.3 square degrees. We tested various approaches to remove the varying gradients in individual flat-field images. Our final optimal method can reduce the spatially dependent errors caused by the gradient to the negligible level. We also suggest a guideline of flat-fielding using twilight/night sky images for wide-field robotic autonomous telescopes.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2011

On the fairness of the main galaxy sample of SDSS

Flux-limited and volume-limited galaxy samples are constructed from SDSS data releases DR4, DR6 and DR7 for statistical analysis. The two-point correlation functions $ξ(s)$, monopole of three-point correlation functions $ζ_0$, projected two-point correlation function $w_p$ and pairwise velocity dispersion $σ_{12}$ are measured to test if galaxy samples are fair for these statistics. We find that with increment of sky coverage of SDSS, $ξ(s)$ of flux-limited sample is extremely robust and insensitive to local structures at low redshift. But for volume-limited samples fainter than $L^*$ at large scales $s>\sim 10\hmpc$, deviation of $ξ(s)$ and $ζ_0$ of DR7 to those of DR4 and DR6 increases with larger absolute magnitude. In the weakly nonlinear regime, there is no agreement between $ζ_0$ of different data releases in all luminosity bins. Furthermore, $w_p$ of volume-limited samples of DR7 in luminosity bins fainter than $-M_{r,0.1}=[18.5,19.5]$ are significantly larger, and $σ_{12}$ of the two faintest volume-limited samples of DR7 display very different scale dependence than results of DR4 and DR6. Our findings call for cautions in understanding clustering analysis results of SDSS faint galaxy samples, and higher order statistics of SDSS volume-limited samples in the weakly nonlinear regime. The first zero-crossing points of $ξ(s)$ of volume-limited samples are also investigated and discussed.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2009

Clustering of K-band selected local galaxies

We present detailed clustering analysis of a large K-band selected local galaxy sample, which is constructed from the 2MASS and the SDSS and consists of $82,486$ galaxies with $10 < K < 13.5$ and $0.01 < z < 0.1$. The two-point correlation function of the magnitude-limited sample in real space at small scales is well described by a power law $ξ(r)=(r/6.44\pm0.23)^{-1.81\pm0.02}$. The pairwise velocity dispersion is derived from the anisotropic two-point correlation function and find the dispersion $σ_{12}=685\pm 17\kms$ if its scale invariance is assumed, which is larger than values measured in optical bands selected galaxy samples. We further investigate the dependence of the two-point correlation function and the $σ_{12}$ on the $g-r$ color and the $K$-band luminosity, obtain similar results to previous works in optical bands. Comparing a mock galaxy sample with our real data indicates that the semi-analytical model can not mimic the $σ_{12}$ in observation albeit it can approximate the two-point correlation function within measurement uncertainties.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2004

The similarity metric

A new class of distances appropriate for measuring similarity relations between sequences, say one type of similarity per distance, is studied. We propose a new ``normalized information distance'', based on the noncomputable notion of Kolmogorov complexity, and show that it is in this class and it minorizes every computable distance in the class (that is, it is universal in that it discovers all computable similarities). We demonstrate that it is a metric and call it the {\em similarity metric}. This theory forms the foundation for a new practical tool. To evidence generality and robustness we give two distinctive applications in widely divergent areas using standard compression programs like gzip and GenCompress. First, we compare whole mitochondrial genomes and infer their evolutionary history. This results in a first completely automatic computed whole mitochondrial phylogeny tree. Secondly, we fully automatically compute the language tree of 52 different languages.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2000

On The Closest String and Substring Problems

The problem of finding a center string that is `close' to every given string arises and has many applications in computational biology and coding theory. This problem has two versions: the Closest String problem and the Closest Substring problem. Assume that we are given a set of strings ${\cal S}=\{s_1, s_2, ..., s_n\}$ of strings, say, each of length $m$. The Closest String problem asks for the smallest $d$ and a string $s$ of length $m$ which is within Hamming distance $d$ to each $s_i\in {\cal S}$. This problem comes from coding theory when we are looking for a code not too far away from a given set of codes. The problem is NP-hard. Berman et al give a polynomial time algorithm for constant $d$. For super-logarithmic $d$, Ben-Dor et al give an efficient approximation algorithm using linear program relaxation technique. The best polynomial time approximation has ratio 4/3 for all $d$ given by Lanctot et al and Gasieniec et al. The Closest Substring problem looks for a string $t$ which is within Hamming distance $d$ away from a substring of each $s_i$. This problem only has a $2- \frac{2}{2|Σ|+1}$ approximation algorithm previously Lanctot et al and is much more elusive than the Closest String problem, but it has many applications in finding conserved regions, genetic drug target identification, and genetic probes in molecular biology. Whether there are efficient approximation algorithms for both problems are major open questions in this area. We present two polynomial time approxmation algorithms with approximation ratio $1+ ε$ for any small $ε$ to settle both questions.

cs.CE↗