arXiv subjects

Matthew W. Craig

Publications and source records attributed to Matthew W. Craig.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Migration and Evolution of giant ExoPlanets (MEEP) II: Super-Jupiters and Lithium-rich Host Stars

Although hot Jupiters were the first exoplanets discovered orbiting main sequence stars, the dominant mechanisms through which they form and evolve are not known. To address the questions surrounding their origins, the Migration and Evolution of giant ExoPlanets (MEEP) survey aims to create a complete, magnitude-limited ($G<$12.5) sample of hot Jupiters that can be used to constrain the frequency of different migration pathways. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite provides the unique combination of sky-coverage and photometric precision to achieve this goal, which will likely be a key result of the mission. In this second installment of the MEEP survey, we reanalyze one benchmark hot Jupiter system, TOI-4138, and discover four additional super-Jupiters which are each more than five times as massive as Jupiter: TOI-4773 b, TOI-5261 b, TOI-5350 b, and TOI-6420 b. One of these planets, TOI-5261 b, is 11.49 times the mass of Jupiter, nearly massive enough to ignite deuterium fusion, and has an eccentric ($e = 0.1585$) orbit. TOI-4138, TOI-4773, TOI-5350, and TOI-6420 each have lithium absorption features in their spectra. TOI-4138 is an F-type subgiant with a lithium equivalent width of $120. \pm 13$ m\r{A}, which is $\sim 4.5\sigma$ larger than the median lithium equivalent width of a control sample of 1381 similar stars, making TOI-4138 a compelling candidate for planetary engulfment.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2025

The TESS Grand Unified Hot Jupiter Survey. III. Thirty More Giant Planets

We present the discovery of 30 transiting giant planets that were initially detected using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. These new planets orbit relatively bright ($G \leq 12.5$) FGK host stars with orbital periods between 1.6 and 8.2 days, and have radii between 0.9 and 1.7 Jupiter radii. We performed follow-up ground-based photometry, high angular-resolution imaging, high-resolution spectroscopy and radial velocity monitoring for each of these objects to confirm that they are planets and determine their masses and other system parameters. The planets' masses span more than an order of magnitude ($0.17\,M_J < M_p < 3.3\,M_J$). For two planets, TOI-3593 b and TOI-4961 b, we measured significant non-zero eccentricities of $0.11^{+0.05}_{-0.03}$ and $0.18^{+0.04}_{-0.05}$ respectively, while for the other planets, the data typically provide a 1-$\sigma$ upper bound of 0.15 on the eccentricity. These discoveries represent a major step toward assembling a complete, magnitude-limited sample of transiting hot Jupiters around FGK stars.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2022

The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package

The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly-developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy Project is the core package $\texttt{astropy}$, which serves as the foundation for more specialized projects and packages. In this article, we summarize key features in the core package as of the recent major release, version 5.0, and provide major updates for the Project. We then discuss supporting a broader ecosystem of interoperable packages, including connections with several astronomical observatories and missions. We also revisit the future outlook of the Astropy Project and the current status of Learn Astropy. We conclude by raising and discussing the current and future challenges facing the Project.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2019

astroquery: An Astronomical Web-Querying Package in Python

astroquery is a collection of tools for requesting data from databases hosted on remote servers with interfaces exposed on the internet, including those with web pages but without formal application program interfaces (APIs). These tools are built on the Python requests package, which is used to make HTTP requests, and astropy, which provides most of the data parsing functionality. astroquery modules generally attempt to replicate the web page interface provided by a given service as closely as possible, making the transition from browser-based to command-line interaction easy. astroquery has received significant contributions from throughout the astronomical community, including several significant contributions from telescope archives. astroquery enables the creation of fully reproducible workflows from data acquisition through publication. This paper describes the philosophy, basic structure, and development model of the astroquery package. The complete documentation for astroquery can be found at http://astroquery.readthedocs.io/.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2015

Learning from FITS: Limitations in use in modern astronomical research

The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard has been a great boon to astronomy, allowing observatories, scientists and the public to exchange astronomical information easily. The FITS standard, however, is showing its age. Developed in the late 1970s, the FITS authors made a number of implementation choices that, while common at the time, are now seen to limit its utility with modern data. The authors of the FITS standard could not anticipate the challenges which we are facing today in astronomical computing. Difficulties we now face include, but are not limited to, addressing the need to handle an expanded range of specialized data product types (data models), being more conducive to the networked exchange and storage of data, handling very large datasets, and capturing significantly more complex metadata and data relationships. There are members of the community today who find some or all of these limitations unworkable, and have decided to move ahead with storing data in other formats. If this fragmentation continues, we risk abandoning the advantages of broad interoperability, and ready archivability, that the FITS format provides for astronomy. In this paper we detail some selected important problems which exist within the FITS standard today. These problems may provide insight into deeper underlying issues which reside in the format and we provide a discussion of some lessons learned. It is not our intention here to prescribe specific remedies to these issues; rather, it is to call attention of the FITS and greater astronomical computing communities to these problems in the hope that it will spur action to address them.

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arXiv2001

The Structure of Dark Matter Halos in an Annihilating Dark Matter Model

The inability of standard non-interacting cold dark matter (CDM) to account for the small scale structure of individual galaxies has led to the suggestion that the dark matter may undergo elastic and/or inelastic scattering. We simulate the evolution of an isolated dark matter halo which undergoes both scattering and annihilation. Annihilations produce a core that grows with time due to adiabatic expansion of the core as the relativistic annihilation products flow out of the core, lessening the binding energy. An effective annihilation cross section per unit mass equal to $>.03 cm^2 g^{-1} (100 km s^{-1}/v$) with a scattering cross section per unit mass of .6 cm g$^{-1}$ produces a 3 kpc core in a 10$^{10}$ M$_{\sun}$ halo that persists for 100 dynamical times. The same cross section leads to a core of only 120 pc in a rich cluster. In addition to creating to cores, annihilation should erase structure on scales below $\sim 3\times10^8$ M$_{\sun}$. Annihilating dark matter provides a mechanism for solving some of the problems of non-interacting CDM, at the expense of introducing a contrived particle physics model.

astro-ph↗