Related papers: Mass estimators in the Gaia era
We investigate the reliability of mass estimators based on the observable velocity dispersion and half-light radius $R_\mathrm{h}$ for dispersion-supported galaxies. We show how to extend them to flattened systems and provide simple…
Astrometric surveys such as Gaia and LSST will measure parallaxes for hundreds of millions of stars. Yet they will not measure a single distance. Rather, a distance must be estimated from a parallax. In this didactic article, I show that…
Microlensing events can be used to directly measure the masses of single field stars to a precision of $\sim$1-10\%. The majority of direct mass measurements for stellar and sub-stellar objects typically only come from observations of…
We present a family of robust tracer mass estimators to compute the enclosed mass of galaxy haloes from samples of discrete positional and kinematical data of tracers, such as halo stars, globular clusters and dwarf satellites. The data may…
Some ideas for onboard processing and photometry with an astrometry satellite are presented, especially designed for GaiaNIR which may be launched about 2045 as a successor of Gaia. - Increased sensitivity, reduced image overlap, and…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically and photometrically millions of main-sequence stars with sufficient sensitivity to brown dwarf companions within a few AUs from their host stars and to transiting brown dwarfs on very…
The Milky Way is filled with the tidally-disrupted remnants of globular clusters and dwarf galaxies. Determining the properties of these objects -- in particular, initial masses and density profiles -- is relevant to both astronomy and dark…
Context: Stellar occultations, greatly enhanced by the publication of the Gaia data releases, permit not only the determination of asteroid size and shape, but also the retrieval of additional, accurate astrometry, with a possible relevant…
The Gaia space project, planned for launch in 2011, is one of the ESA cornerstone missions, and will provide astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data of very high quality for about one billion stars brighter than V=20. This will…
High resolution maps of maser emission provide very detailed information on processes occurring in circumstellar envelopes of late-type stars. A particularly detailed picture of the innermost shells around AGB stars is provided by SiO…
ESA recently called for new "Science Ideas" to be investigated in terms of feasibility and technological developments -- for technologies not yet sufficiently mature. These ideas may in the future become candidates for M or L class missions…
Space provides unique opportunities to test gravitation. By using an interplanetary spacecraft as a test mass, it is possible to test General Relativity at the Solar System distance scale. This requires to compute accurately the trajectory…
In the past several years high resolution kinematic data sets from Milky Way satellite galaxies have confirmed earlier indications that these systems are dark matter dominated objects. Further understanding of what these galaxies reveal…
The next generation of high-precision astrometry is rapidly approaching thanks to ongoing and upcoming missions like Euclid, LSST, and RST. We present a new tool (available at https://github.com/KevinMcK95/gaia_roman_astrometry) to simulate…
The accuracy of stellar distances inferred purely from parallaxes degrades rapidly with distance. Proper motion measurements, when combined with some idea of typical velocities, provide independent information on stellar distances. Here I…
The problem of determination of the orbital velocity of an astrometric satellite from its own observational data is studied. It is well known that data processing of microarcsecond-level astrometric observations imposes very stringent…
Mass ratios of widely separated, long-period, resolved binary stars can be directly estimated from the available data in major space astrometry catalogs, such as the ESA's Hipparcos and Gaia mission results. The method is based on the…
Precise exoplanet characterization requires precise classification of exoplanet host stars. The masses of host stars are commonly estimated by comparing their spectra to those predicted by stellar evolution models. However,…
Under certain conditions, stellar radial velocities can be determined from astrometry, without any use of spectroscopy. This enables us to identify phenomena, other than the Doppler effect, that are displacing spectral lines. The change of…
This paper is related to our previous works [1][2] on the error estimate of the averaging technique, for systems with one fast angular variable. In the cited references, a general method (of mixed analytical and numerical type) has been…