Related papers: Mass estimators in the Gaia era
Gaia is an ambitious space astrometry mission of ESA with a main objective to map the sky in astrometry and photometry down to a magnitude 20 by the end of the next decade. While the mission is built and operated by ESA and an industrial…
We live in an age where an enormous amount of astrometric, photometric, asteroseismic, and spectroscopic data of Milky Way stars are being acquired, many orders of magnitude larger than about a decade ago. Thanks to the Gaia astrometric…
The two most common mass estimators that use velocity dispersions and positions of objects in a stellar system, the virial mass estimator (VME) and the projected mass estimator (PME), are revisited and tested using N-body experiments. We…
The techniques of laser cooling combined with atom interferometry make possible the realization of very sensitive and accurate inertial sensors like gyroscopes or accelerometers. Besides earth-based developments, the use of these techniques…
According to current plans, the SIM/NASA mission will be launched just after the end of operations for the Gaia/ESA mission. This is a new situation which enables long term astrometric projects that could not be achieved by either mission…
This paper discusses a novel approach for detecting moving massive objects based on the time variation that these objects produce in the local gravitational field measured by several detectors. Such an approach may provide a viable method…
We revisit a model-independent estimator for cosmic acceleration based on type Ia supernovae distance measurements. This approach does not rely on any specific theory for gravity, energy content or parameterization for the scale factor or…
We present MINESweeper, a tool to measure stellar parameters by jointly fitting observed spectra and broadband photometry to model isochrones and spectral libraries. This approach enables the measurement of spectrophotometric distances, in…
The ESA Gaia mission, to be launched during 2013, will observe billions of objects, among which many galaxies, during its scanning of the sky. This will provide a large space-based dataset with unprecedented spatial resolution. Because of…
Selection of extragalactic point sources, e.g. QSOs, is often hampered by significant selection effects causing existing samples to have rather complex selection functions. We explore whether a purely astrometric selection of extragalactic…
We present estimates of distances, ages and masses for over 6 million stars. These estimates are derived from the combination of spectrophotometric data and Gaia eDR3 parallaxes. For that, we used the previously published Unified tool to…
A general purpose fitting model for one-dimensional astrometric signals is developed, building on a maximum likelihood framework, and its performance is evaluated by simulation over a set of realistic image instances. The fit quality is…
Astrometric microlensing is a unique tool to measure stellar masses. It allows us to determine the mass of the lensing star with an accuracy of a few per cent. In this paper, we update, extend, and refine our predictions of…
The large-scale structure of the universe can only be observed via luminous tracers of the dark matter. However, the clustering statistics of tracers are biased and depend on various properties, such as their host-halo mass and assembly…
We homogeneously measured the elliptical shapes of 163 globular clusters (GCs) using the on-sky distribution of their cluster members and the third data release of the ESA mission Gaia (DR3). The astrometry enables the differentiation of…
A method is proposed for constraining the Galactic gravitational potential from high precision observations of the phase space coordinates of a system of relaxed tracers. The method relies on an "ergodic" assumption that the observations…
Gaia is an astrometric space experiment that is measuring positions, proper motions as well as parallaxes for a huge number of stars. It operates a medium-dispersion spectrometer, the RVS, that provides spectra and thus radial velocity…
Forthcoming large-scale spectroscopic surveys will soon provide data on thousands of galaxy clusters. It is important that the systematics of the various mass estimation techniques are well understood and calibrated. We compare three…
Observations of internal motions in globular clusters offer unique insights into the dynamics of the clusters. We have recently developed methods of high-precision astrometry with HST's WFPC2 camera, which allow us to measure internal…
In this proceeding, we show how observations of Solar System Objects with Gaia can be used to test General Relativity and to constrain modified gravitational theories. The high number of Solar System objects observed and the variety of…