Related papers: Mass estimators in the Gaia era

Stellar clusters are important for astrophysics in many ways, for instance as optimal tracers of the Galactic populations to which they belong or as one of the best test bench for stellar evolutionary models. Gaia DR1, with TGAS, is just…

Astrometric positions of moving objects in the Solar System have been measured using a variety of star catalogs in the past. Previous work has shown that systematic errors in star catalogs can affect the accuracy of astrometric…

The body of photometric and astrometric data on stars in the Galaxy has been growing very fast in recent years (Hipparcos/Tycho, OGLE-3, 2-Mass, DENIS, UCAC2, SDSS, RAVE, Pan Starrs, Hermes, ...) and in two years ESA will launch the Gaia…

Stellar mass is a fundamental parameter that is key to our understanding of stellar formation and evolution, as well as the characterization of nearby exoplanet companions. Historically, stellar masses have been derived from long-term…

Over the course of several years, stars trace helical trajectories as they traverse across the sky due to the combined effects of proper motion and parallax. It is well known that the gravitational pull of an unseen companion can cause…

The Gaia space astrometry mission is measuring accurate distances and space motions of more than two billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. This is a first look at how Gaia is contributing to fundamental physics, and in particular…

We perform an extensive review of the numerous studies and methods used to determine the total mass of the Milky Way. We group the various methods into seven broad classes, including: i) estimating Galactic escape velocity using high…

The observed stellar kinematics of dispersion-supported galaxies are often used to measure dynamical masses. Recently, several analytical relationships between the stellar line-of-sight velocity dispersion, the projected (2D) or deprojected…

The era of high-precision astrometry has dawned upon us. The potential of Gaia $\mu$as-level precision in positional measurements is about to be unleashed in the field of extrasolar planetary systems. The Gaia data hold the promise for much…

The sheer size of high-accuracy, multi-band photometry, spectroscopy, astrometry and seismic data that space missions like Kepler, Gaia, PLATO, TESS, JWST and ground-based facilities under development such as MOONS, WEAVE and the LSST will…

The Gaia satellite will survey the entire celestial sphere down to 20th magnitude, obtaining astrometry, photometry, and low resolution spectrophotometry on one billion astronomical sources, plus radial velocities for over one hundred…

Estimation of time delays from a noisy and gapped data is one of the simplest data analysis problems in astronomy by its formulation. But as history of real experiments show, the work with observed data sets can be quite complex and…

Using the VLBA, the BeSSeL survey has provided distances and proper motions of young massive stars, allowing an accurate measure of the Galactic spiral structure. By the same technique, we are planning to map the inner Galaxy using…

We present a new analysis on how to distinguish between isotropic and anisotropic cosmological models based on tracking the angular displacements of a large number of distant quasars over an extended period of time, and then performing a…

The GAIA astrometric mission has recently been approved as one of the next two `cornerstones' of ESA's science programme, with a launch date target of not later than mid-2012. GAIA will provide positional and radial velocity measurements…

This tutorial covers the use of absolute astrometry, in particular from the combination of the Hipparcos and Gaia missions, to identify faint companions to nearby stars and to measure the masses and orbits of those companions. Absolute…

The inference of stellar parameters (such as radius and mass) through asteroseismic forward modelling depends on the number, accuracy, and precision of seismic and atmospheric constraints. ESA's Gaia space mission is providing precise…

The GAIA satellite can precisely measure the masses of nearby brown dwarfs and lower main sequence stars by the microlensing effect. The scientific yield is maximised if the microlensing event is also followed with ground-based telescopes…

The power of micro-arcsecond ($\mu$as) astrometry is about to be unleashed. ESA's Gaia mission, now headed towards the end of the first year of routine science operations, will soon fulfil its promise for revolutionary science in countless…

As the most ancient branch of astronomy, astrometry has been developed for thousands of years. However, it has only recently become possible to utilize astrometry for the detection of exoplanets. Gaia, an astrometric surveyor of 1 billion…