Related papers: Getting ready for the micro-arcsecond era
Gaia is an all sky, high precision astrometric and photometric satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) due for launch in 2010-2011. Its primary mission is to study the composition, formation and evolution of our Galaxy. Gaia will…
Precision astrometry at microarcsecond accuracy has application to a wide range of astrophysical problems. This paper is a study of the science questions that can be addressed using an instrument that delivers parallaxes at about 4…
Astrometric microlensing will offer in the next future a new channel for investigating the nature of both lenses and sources involved in a gravitational microlensing event. The effect, corresponding to the shift of the position of the…
The days of the lone astronomer with his optical telescope and photographic plates are long gone: Astronomy in 2025 will not only be multi-wavelength, but multi-messenger, and dominated by huge data sets and matching data rates. Catalogues…
With the aim of paving the road for future accurate astrometry with MICADO at the European-ELT, we performed an astrometric study using two different but complementary approaches to investigate two critical components that contribute to the…
Photometric light curves suffer from fundamental degeneracies that limit surface information recovery. We demonstrate that astrometry enables access to complementary information through photocentre variations induced by rotating surface…
Current and future large astronomical surveys will yield multiparameter databases on millions or even billions of objects. The scientific exploitation of these will require powerful, robust, and automated classification tools tailored to…
This is a personal review of various issues related to massive photometric and astrometric searches. A complete inventory of variable stars down to almost any magnitude limit will improve our understanding of the stellar evolution and the…
In recent years, machine learning (ML) methods have remarkably improved how cosmologists can interpret data. The next decade will bring new opportunities for data-driven cosmological discovery, but will also present new challenges for…
Recent investigations (e.g. Han et al. 2001) have shown that fitting the Hipparcos observations with an orbital model when the astrometric wobble caused by the companion is below the noise level can have rather unexpected consequences. With…
We here propose the time drift of subtended angles as a new possible cosmological probe. In particular, with the coming era of microarcsecond astrometry, our proposal can be used to measure the Hubble expansion rate of our universe in a…
Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…
Astrophotonics is a burgeoning field that lies at the interface of photonics and modern astronomical instrumentation. Here we provide a pedagogical review of basic photonic functions that enable modern instruments, and give an overview of…
Astrophysics and cosmology are rich with data. The advent of wide-area digital cameras on large aperture telescopes has led to ever more ambitious surveys of the sky. Data volumes of entire surveys a decade ago can now be acquired in a…
Multi-messenger astronomy will be transformed in the 2040s by an unprecedented volume of detections from next-generation gravitational wave, high-energy, and ultra-high energy neutrino, cosmic ray, and time domain observatories. This white…
A critical assessment of the quality of the Hipparcos data, partly supported by a completely new analysis of the raw data, is presented with the aim of clarifying reliability issues that have surfaced since the publication of the Hipparcos…
We introduce our new program to develop two-dimensional MEMS arrays of individually addressable micro-mirrors (''Micro-Mirror Devices'', MMDs) specifically optimized for astronomy, multi-slit spectroscopy in particular. After reviewing the…
We are now beginning to learn detailed information about cosmological parameters from the shapes of the matter and radiation power spectra, together with their relative normalization. As more high quality data are gathered from galaxy…
I analyze several catalogs of known visual and spectroscopic binaries and conclude that a large number of binaries is missing in current catalogs. Samples of the best studied (nearby and bright) stars indicate that the true binary fraction…
Context.A new reduction of the astrometric data as produced by the Hipparcos mission has been published, claiming accuracies for nearly all stars brighter than magnitude Hp = 8 to be better, by up to a factor 4, than in the original…