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We have built a reliable and robust system that takes as input an astronomical image, and returns as output the pointing, scale, and orientation of that image (the astrometric calibration or WCS information). The system requires no first…
Astrophysical studies require a knowledge of very accurate positions, motions and distances of stars. A brief overview is given of the significance and development of astrometry by ESA's two astrometric satellites, Hipparcos and Gaia,…
Observing habitable exoplanets that may resemble Earth is a key priority in astronomy that is dependent on not only detecting such worlds, but also ascertaining that apparent signatures of habitability are not due to other sources. Space…
With sub-microarcsecond angular accuracy, the \theia telescope will be capable of revealing the architectures of nearby exoplanetary systems down to the mass of Earth. This research addresses the challenges inherent in space astrometry…
The current role of data-driven science is constantly increasing its importance within Astrophysics, due to the huge amount of multi-wavelength data collected every day, characterized by complex and high-volume information requiring…
Missions such as WMAP or Planck measure full-sky fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background and foregrounds, among which bright compact source emissions cover a significant fraction of the sky. To accurately estimate the diffuse…
We present a method to map the artificial sky brightness across large territories in astronomical photometric bands with a resolution of approximately 1 km. This is useful to quantify the situation of night sky pollution, to recognize…
Direct photometric measurements of the cosmic optical background (COB) provide an important point of comparison to both other measurement methodologies and models of cosmic structure formation, and permit a cosmic consistency test with the…
Large spectroscopic surveys have enabled in the recent years the computation of three-dimensional interstellar extinction maps thanks to accurate stellar atmospheric parameters and line-of-sight distances. Such maps are complementary to 3D…
The standard cosmological model based on cold dark matter (CDM) predicts a large number of subhalos for each galaxy-size halo. It is well known that matching the subhalos to the observed properties of luminous satellites of galaxies in the…
We investigate the luminosity functions (LFs) and projected number density profiles of galactic satellites around isolated primaries of different luminosities. We measure these quantities for model satellites placed into the Millennium and…
Traditional photometric redshift methods use only color information about the objects in question to estimate their redshifts. This paper introduces a new method utilizing colors, luminosity, surface brightness, and radial light profile to…
New micro-satellite constellations enable unprecedented systematic monitoring applications thanks to their wide coverage and short revisit capabilities. However, the large volumes of images that they produce have uneven qualities, creating…
Over the past decade, microlensing has developed into a powerful tool to study stellar astrophysics, especially stellar atmospheres, stellar masses, and binarity. I review this progress. Stellar atmospheres can be probed whenever the source…
Star surveys and model analyses show that many stars have absolute stable fluxes as good as 3% in 0.3-35{\mu}m wavebands and about 1% in the visible wavebands. The relative flux calibrations between stars are better than 0.2%. Some stars…
We present two new source extraction methods, based on Bayesian model selection and using the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The first is a source detection filter, able to simultaneously detect point sources and estimate the image…
More than 450 exoplanets are known and this number increases nearly every day. Only a few constraints on their orbital parameters and physical characteristics can be determined, as most exoplanets are detected indirectly. Measuring the…
The first step toward doing high-precision astrometry is the measurement of individual stars in individual images, a step that is fraught with dangers when the images are undersampled. The key to avoiding systematic positional error in…
Because of the recent technological advances, the key technologies needed for precision space optical astrometry are now in hand. The Microarcsecond Astrometry Probe (MAP) mission concept is designed to find 1 Earth mass planets at 1AU…
The annihilations of neutralino dark matter (or other dark matter candidate) generate, among other Standard Model states, electrons and positrons. These particles emit synchrotron photons as a result of their interaction with the Galactic…