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    The Optical Variability of the BL Lac AO 0235+164
    (Basel : MDPI, 2016) Fan, Junhui; Kurtanidze, Omar; Liu, Yi; Liu, Xiang; Richter, Gotthard; Nikolashvili, Maria; Kurtanidze, Sophia; Chanishvili, Revaz; Wang, Hongtao; Sasada, Mahito; Zhou, Aiying; Lin, Chao; Yuan, Yuhai
    In this work, we present optical R band observations of AO 0235+164 carried out during the period of November 2006 to December 2012 using the Ap6E CCD camera attached to the primary focus of the 70 cm meniscus telescope at Abastumani Observatory, Georgia. It shows a large variation of ΔR = 4.88 mag (14.19–19.07 mag) and a short time scale of ΔTv = 73.5 min during our monitoring period. When periodicity analysis methods are applied to the R-band data from both historic and our observations, periods P1 = 8.26 yr and P2 = 0.54 yr are found.
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    ExoClock project: an open platform for monitoring the ephemerides of Ariel targets with contributions from the public
    (Dordrecht [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media B.V, 2021) Kokori, Anastasia; Tsiaras, Angelos; Edwards, Billy; Rocchetto, Marco; Tinetti, Giovanna; Wünsche, Anaël; Paschalis, Nikolaos; Agnihotri, Vikrant Kumar; Bachschmidt, Matthieu; Bretton, Marc; Caines, Hamish; Caló, Mauro; Casali, Roland; Crow, Martin; Dawes, Simon; Deldem, Marc; Deligeorgopoulos, Dimitrios; Dymock, Roger; Evans, Phil; Falco, Carmelo; Ferratfiat, Stephane; Fowler, Martin; Futcher, Stephen; Guerra, Pere; Hurter, Francois; Jones, Adrian; Kang, Wonseok; Kim, Taewoo; Lee, Richard; Lopresti, Claudio; Marino, Antonio; Mallonn, Matthias; Mortari, Fabio; Morvan, Mario; Mugnai, Lorenzo V.; Nastasi, Alessandro; Perroud, Valère; Pereira, Cédric; Phillips, Mark; Pintr, Pavel; Raetz, Manfred; Regembal, Francois; Savage, John; Sedita, Danilo; Sioulas, Nick; Strikis, Iakovos; Thurston, Geoffrey; Tomacelli, Andrea; Tomatis, Alberto
    The Ariel mission will observe spectroscopically around 1000 exoplanets to further characterise their atmospheres. For the mission to be as efficient as possible, a good knowledge of the planets’ ephemerides is needed before its launch in 2028. While ephemerides for some planets are being refined on a per-case basis, an organised effort to collectively verify or update them when necessary does not exist. In this study, we introduce the ExoClock project, an open, integrated and interactive platform with the purpose of producing a confirmed list of ephemerides for the planets that will be observed by Ariel. The project has been developed in a manner to make the best use of all available resources: observations reported in the literature, observations from space instruments and, mainly, observations from ground-based telescopes, including both professional and amateur observatories. To facilitate inexperienced observers and at the same time achieve homogeneity in the results, we created data collection and validation protocols, educational material and easy to use interfaces, open to everyone. ExoClock was launched in September 2019 and now counts over 140 participants from more than 15 countries around the world. In this release, we report the results of observations obtained until the 15h of April 2020 for 120 Ariel candidate targets. In total, 632 observations were used to either verify or update the ephemerides of 84 planets. Additionally, we developed the Exoplanet Characterisation Catalogue (ECC), a catalogue built in a consistent way to assist the ephemeris refinement process. So far, the collaborative open framework of the ExoClock project has proven to be highly efficient in coordinating scientific efforts involving diverse audiences. Therefore, we believe that it is a paradigm that can be applied in the future for other research purposes, too.
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    The Longest Delay: A 14.5 yr Campaign to Determine the Third Time Delay in the Lensing Cluster SDSS J1004+4112
    (London : Institute of Physics Publ., 2022) Muñoz, J.A.; Kochanek, C.S.; Fohlmeister, J.; Wambsganss, J.; Falco, E.; Forés-Toribio, R.
    We present new light curves for the four bright images of the five image cluster-lensed quasar gravitational lens system SDSS J1004+4112. The light curves span 14.5 yr and allow the measurement of the time delay between the trailing bright quasar image D and the leading image C. When we fit all four light curves simultaneously and combine the models using the Bayesian information criterion, we find a time delay of Δt DC = 2458.47 ± 1.02 days (6.73 yr), the longest ever measured for a gravitational lens. For the other two independent time delays we obtain Δt BC = 782.20 ± 0.43 days (2.14 yr) and Δt AC = 825.23 ± 0.46 days (2.26 yr), in agreement with previous results. The information criterion is needed to weight the results for light curve models with different polynomial orders for the intrinsic variability and the effects of differential microlensing. The results using the Akaike information criterion are slightly different, but, in practice, the absolute delay errors are all dominated by the ∼4% cosmic variance in the delays rather than the statistical or systematic measurement uncertainties. Despite the lens being a cluster, the quasar images show slow differential variability due to microlensing at the level of a few tenths of a magnitude.