In this work we show that modifying the thermal history of the Universe by including an early period of matter domination can lead to the formation of astronomical objects. However, the survival of these objects can only be possible if the dominating matter decays to a daughter particle which is not only almost degenerate with the parent particle but also has an open annihilation channel. This ...

When astronomers analyze sky images, they need to identify the newly observed celestial objects in the catalog of known objects. We have developed a technique for indexing catalogs, which supports fast retrieval of closely matching catalog objects for every object in new images. It allows processing of a sky image in less than a second, and it scales to catalogs with billions of objects. Keywor...

Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in the 20th book of the Odyssey ("Theoclymenus's prophecy") to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse. In the late 1920s, Schoch and Neugebauer computed that the solar eclipse of 16 April 1178 B.C.E. was total over the Ionian Islands and was the only suitable eclipse in more than a century to agree with classical estimates of the deca...

This work explores the use of big data technologies deployed in the cloud for processing of astronomical data. We have applied Hadoop and Spark to the task of co-adding astronomical images. We compared the overhead and execution time of these frameworks. We conclude that performance of both frameworks is generally on par. The Spark API is more flexible, which allows one to easily construct astr...

We present a versatile new instrument capable of measuring rovibrational transition frequencies of molecular ions with sub-MHz accuracy and precision. A liquid-nitrogen cooled positive column discharge cell, which can produce large column densities of a wide variety of molecular ions, is probed with sub-Doppler spectroscopy enabled by a high-power optical parametric oscillator locked to a moder...

To properly characterize the atmospheric properties of a site for a future large telescope or interferometer, it is insufficient to measure quantities, such as the full-width at half-maximum of a stellar image, that have been integrated over the entire atmosphere. A knowledge of the turbulence distribution as a function of height is necessary, since this affects the ease and degree to which ada...

We present computer simulations of interferometric imaging with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Astronomical MultiBEam Recombiner (AMBER) phase-closure instrument. These simulations include both the astrophysical modelling of a stellar object by radiative transfer calculations and the simulation of light propagation from the obje...

The Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) was installed in the Hubble Space Telescope in February 1997. After twenty-two months of operation the 110 kg supply of solid N2, which cooled the NICMOS-3 HgCdTe detectors, was exhausted. The cryostat warmed up leaving the instrument in an electromechanically functional, but scientifically non-viable, passive state. Following a th...