Random time series in astronomy

Abstract

X-ray and Observational Astronomy Group, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK Progress in astronomy comes from interpreting the signals encoded in the light received from distant objects: the distribution of light over the sky (images), over photon wavelength (spectrum), over polarization angle and over time (usually called light curves by astronomers). In the time domain, we see transient events such as supernovae, gammaray bursts and other powerful explosions; we see periodic phenomena such as the orbits of planets around nearby stars, radio pulsars and pulsations of stars in nearby galaxies; and we see persistent aperiodic variations ('noise') from powerful systems such as accreting black holes. I review just a few of the recent and future challenges in the burgeoning area of time domain astrophysics, with particular attention to persistently variable sources, the recovery of reliable noise power spectra from sparsely sampled time series, higher order properties of accreting black holes, and time delays and correlations in multi-variate time series. © 2012 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.