In March I got invited to give a talk for the Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg group. Back then June 21 looked like a far date in a relative relaxed time period. I was so wrong… they are so hectic days!
Nevertheless, I managed to prepare a talk entitled: “The ASSESS classifier: a machine-learning tool to uncover populations of evolved massive stars in nearby galaxies”. I tried to prepare a more general introduction to the massive stars and their evolution, along with the issues we are facing as far as mass loss. I highlighted the importance of the ASSESS project and the provide a short description of what is ASSESS all about. Then I described the machine-learning classifier we developed and our first results from this.
Although pressing, at the end I really enjoyed this talk!
Last night I was working on the laptop when naturally it asked for some power. Typically, when you plug in the power is should charge the battery, right? Well… no, it didn’t do that at all!
And then dread start developing! What is wrong? Is it the plug, the connector or even worse the port? As it was late I called it a day and went to bed. Today, I started by trying another power cable and finally another charger … in vain! Then, Tassos K. told me the obvious “Why you don’t look it up, somebody should have written about it“.
It was really a great opportunity. Not only I managed to meet in-person people and collaborators that I met through zoom meetings but actually it was the first time (since 2020) to meet also my colleagues working in the ASSESS project (while some of them for the first time!).
The event was of course a great place to present our latest results. I got the privilege to have a talk about our latest results from the machine-learning classifier we have developed (see this post).
Talk: “Introducing the ASSESS project: Episodic Mass Loss in Evolved Massive Stars – Key to Understanding the Explosive Early Universe” – Alceste Bonanos
Talk: “Using machine-learning to investigate the populations of dusty evolved stars in various metallicities” – Grigoris Maravelias
Poster: “Progenitors and companions of stripped-envelope supernovae” – Manos Zapartas
Poster: “Properties of dusty Red Supergiant stars in the Magellanic Clouds” – Stephan de Wit
Poster: “ASSESSing evolved massive stars in NGC 6822 and IC 10” – Gonzalo Munoz Sanchez
From left: Grigoris Maravelias, Stephan de Wit, Konstantinos Antoniadis, Frank Tramper, Alceste Bonanos, Manos Zapartas, Gonzalo Munoz Sanchez, Evangelia Christodoulou
Following the success of the first Astrostatistics Summer School in Crete in 2019 (18-21 June), we now organize its second iteration (11-15 July). Initially scheduled for 2020, but we all now what happened and it was delayed. Now things to have matured so that we can actually repeat it and of course with an in person meeting as this school presents the theory but it is heavily based on actual hands-on experience with real astronomical data.
For all interested individuals please check the website. There is not much time before we meet in July !
This is the first paper that results from my work with the ASSESS team over the last years. It focuses on the development of a machine-learning photometric classifier to characterize massive stars originating from IR (Spitzer) catalogs, which will help us understand the episodic mass loss. The first paper presents the method and the multiple test we performed to understand its capabilities and limitations. Now we proceed with the derivation of the catalogs and their analysis.
A machine-learning photometric classifier for massive stars in nearby galaxies I. The method
Grigoris Maravelias, Alceste Z. Bonanos, Frank Tramper, Stephan de Wit, Ming Yang, Paolo Bonfini
Context. Mass loss is a key parameter in the evolution of massive stars. Despite the recent progress in the theoretical understanding of how stars lose mass, discrepancies between theory and observations still hold. Moreover, episodic mass loss in evolved massive stars is not included in the models while the importance of its role in the evolution of massive stars is currently undetermined. Aims. A major hindrance to determining the role of episodic mass loss is the lack of large samples of classified stars. Given the recent availability of extensive photometric catalogs from various surveys spanning a range of metallicity environments, we aim to remedy the situation by applying machine learning techniques to these catalogs. Methods. We compiled a large catalog of known massive stars in M31 and M33 using IR (Spitzer) and optical (Pan-STARRS) photometry, as well as Gaia astrometric information which helps with foreground source detection. We grouped them in 7 classes (Blue, Red, Yellow, B[e] supergiants, Luminous Blue Variables, Wolf-Rayet, and outliers, e.g. QSOs and background galaxies). As this training set is highly imbalanced, we implemented synthetic data generation to populate the underrepresented classes and improve separation by undersampling the majority class. We built an ensemble classifier utilizing color indices as features. The probabilities from three machine-learning algorithms (Support Vector Classification, Random Forests, Multi-layer Perceptron) were combined to obtain the final classification. Results. The overall weighted balanced accuracy of the classifier is ∼ 83%. Red supergiants are always recovered at ∼ 94%. Blue and Yellow supergiants, B[e] supergiants, and background galaxies achieve ∼ 50 − 80%. Wolf-Rayet sources are detected at ∼ 45% while Luminous Blue Variables are recovered at ∼ 30% from one method mainly. This is primarily due to the small sample sizes of these classes. In addition, the mixing of spectral types, as there are no strict boundaries in the features space (color indices) between those classes, complicates the classification. In an independent application of the classifier to other galaxies (IC 1613, WLM, Sextans A) we obtained an overall accuracy of ∼ 70%. This discrepancy is attributed to the different metallicity and extinction effects of their host galaxies. Motivated by the presence of missing values we investigated the impact of missing data imputation using simple replacement with mean values and an iterative imputor, which proved to be more capable. We also investigated the feature importance to find that r − i and y − [3.6] were the most important, although different classes are sensitive to different features (with potential improvement with additional features). Conclusions. The prediction capability of the classifier is limited by the available number of sources per class (which corresponds to the sampling of their feature space), reflecting the rarity of these objects and the possible physical links between these massive star phases. Our methodology is also efficient in correctly classifying sources with missing data, as well as at lower metallicities (with some accuracy loss), making it an excellent tool for accentuating interesting objects and prioritizing targets for observations.
The confusion matrix for 54 sources without missing values in the three galaxies (IC 1613, WLM, and Sextans A). We achieve an overall accuracy of ~70%, and we notice that the largest confusion occurs between BSG and YSG. The overall difference in the accuracy compared to that obtained with the M31 and M33 sample is attributed to the photometric errors, and the effect of metallicity and extinction in these galaxies.
The following paper is the result of a tedious task that my good friend Manos Kardasis undertook over the last two+ years. He noticed the presence of this (relatively newly discovered) feature in Venus and collected images from amateur observers worldwide to study in detail the discontinuity and constrain some of its properties by comparison with data from JAXA’s Akatsuki.
The importance of this work is twofold: a. it shows the high potential of observations with small telescopes to perform scientific studies of quality, and b. it promotes and encourage encourage amateur observers to perform and increase the observations of Venus.
I am really happy with this paper as it is a very well-deserved outcome of the work and effort that Manos put into this (fighting and joggling with many other things at the same time) and it showcases how a professional-amateur collaboration can succeed. Well done Manos!
Amateur Observers Witness the Return of Venus’ Cloud Discontinuity
Kardasis E., Peralta J., Maravelias G., Imai M., Wesley A., Olivetti T., Naryzhniy Y., Morrone L., Gallardo A., Calapai G., Camarena J., Casquinha P., Kananovich D., MacNeill N., Viladrich C., Takoudi A.
Firstly identified in images from JAXA’s orbiter Akatsuki, the cloud discontinuity of Venus is a planetary-scale phenomenon known to be recurrent since, at least, the 1980s. Interpreted as a new type of Kelvin wave, this disruption is associated to dramatic changes in the clouds’ opacity and distribution of aerosols, and it may constitute a critical piece for our understanding of the thermal balance and atmospheric circulation of Venus. Here, we report its reappearance on the dayside middle clouds four years after its last detection with Akatsuki/IR1, and for the first time, we characterize its main properties using exclusively near-infrared images from amateur observations. In agreement with previous reports, the discontinuity exhibited temporal variations in its zonal speed, orientation, length, and its effect over the clouds’ albedo during the 2019/2020 eastern elongation. Finally, a comparison with simultaneous observations by Akatsuki UVI and LIR confirmed that the discontinuity is not visible on the upper clouds’ albedo or thermal emission, while zonal speeds are slower than winds at the clouds’ top and faster than at the middle clouds, evidencing that this Kelvin wave might be transporting momentum up to upper clouds.
Figure 1: Observations of cloud discontinuities, observed in the 2019/2020 eastern elongation of Venus, showing different morphologies.
When creating finding charts for observations with the OSIRIS instrument on GTC you need to check the field-of-view (fov). With the Aladin Sky Atlas it is easy to download an image and overplot an instrument footprint (Edit > Load instrument footprint). Although there is a selection of instruments, by default the OSIRIS is not included. It is possible however to “create your footprint” which opens a link to an online editor.
Using this and the information collected from the manual and the web for OSIRIS I created a footprint that displays the fov for the imaging (larger box) along with the fov for the Multi-Object Spectroscopy (inner boxes) which display the two CCDs with the gap in between. Then, it is easy to place the footprint to the exact coordinates you wish in order to include (or exclude) sources of interest, check which parts are outside the fields or in the gap.
You can find the file here: gtc-osiris-v2.vot (better right click on that and save as…)
An example image for NGC 2403 with three footprints overplotted.
Revisiting the evolved hypergiants in the Magellanic Clouds
Kourniotis, M.; Kraus, M.; Maryeva, O.; Borges Fernandes, M.; Maravelias, G.
The massive stars that survive the phase of red supergiants (RSGs) spend the rest of their life in extremity. Their unstable atmospheres facilitate the formation and episodic ejection of shells that alter the stellar appearance and surroundings. In the present study, we revise the evolutionary state of eight hypergiants in the Magellanic Clouds, four of early-A type and four of FG type, and complement the short list of the eruptive post-RSGs termed as yellow hypergiants (YHGs). We refine the outdated temperatures and luminosities of the stars by means of high-resolution spectroscopy with FEROS. The A-type stars are suggested to be in their early, post-main sequence phase, showing spectrophotometric characteristics of redward evolving supergiants. On the other hand, the FG-type stars manifest themselves through the enhanced atmospheric activity that is traced by emission filling in Hα and the dynamical modulation of the low-excitation Ba II line. Of these stars, the dusty HD269723 is suggested to have recently departed from a cool phase. We identify double-peaked emission in the FEROS data of HD269953 that emerges from an orbiting disk-hosting companion. The highlight of the study is an episode of enhanced mass loss of HD271182 that manifests as a dimming event in the lightcurve and renders the star “modest” analogue to ρ Cas. The luminosity log (L/L⊙) = 5.6 of HD271182 can serve as an updated threshold for the luminosity of stars exhibiting a post-RSG evolution in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This is a paper that I finally managed to complete. Starting back in 2016 we looked into the light curves for ρ Cas to identify potential correlations with its latest outburst in 2013, but not all data made it through the final paper (Kraus et al. 2019). Given this first analysis and the fact that visual observations cover almost a century of star’s behavior, we continued the study and we looked into the four distinct outbursts. The result is even more interesting as there is a clear trend of shorter and more frequent outbursts, as if ρ Cas is bouncing against the Yellow Void.
Bouncing against the Yellow Void — exploring the outbursts of ρ Cas from visual observations
Grigoris Maravelias and Michaela Kraus
Massive stars are rare but of paramount importance for their immediate environment and their host galaxies. They lose mass from their birth through strong stellar winds up to their spectacular end of their lives as supernovae. The mass loss changes as they evolve and in some phases it becomes episodic or displays outburst activity. One such phase is the Yellow Hypergiants, in which they experience outbursts due to their pulsations and atmosphere instabilities. This is depicted in photometry as a decrease in their apparent magnitude. The object ρ Cassiopeia (Cas) is a bright and well known variable star that has experienced four major outbursts over the last century, with the most recent one detected in 2013. We derived the light curves from both visual and digital observations and we show that with some processing and a small correction (∼0.2 mag) for the visual the two curves match. This highlights the importance of visual observations both because of the accuracy we can obtain and because they fully cover the historic activity (only the last two of the four outbursts are well covered by digital observations) with a homogeneous approach. By fitting the outburst profiles from visual observations we derive the duration of each outburst. We notice a decreasing trend in the duration, as well as shorter intervals between the outbursts. This activity indicates that ρ Cas may be preparing to pass to the next evolutionary phase.
Figure 3.The duration of each outburst (dots) with time(using the minimum dates as identified from the fitting process). There is a trend of shorter outbursts with time (linear model indicated with the violet dashed line). They also seem to occur more frequently, as it is indicated by the time difference between the outbursts (violet arrows).
