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Abstract:
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Astronomical time series—measurements of a celestial source’s brightness as a function of time—are key to probing the physical processes governing the behaviour of these sources on a wide range of scales, from small asteroids in our solar system, to supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. Modern telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum, including the Rubin Observatory, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), are producing extraordinarily large, complex data sets that challenge traditional approaches to data analysis. In this talk, I will introduce a subset of the wide range of time series we observe from astrophysical objects, and discuss how we measure them. I will present current problems in detecting periodic and quasi-periodic signals in black holes and neutron stars against a background of stochastic processes, and show ways where new statistical approaches to these data sets can help us constrain the underlying physics.
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