Related papers: Quasometry, Its Use and Purpose
High-fidelity spectroscopy presents challenges for both observations and in designing instruments. High-resolution and high-accuracy spectra are required for verifying hydrodynamic stellar atmospheres and for resolving intergalactic…
Current X-ray observations and simulations show that gravitational lensing can be used to infer the structure near the event horizons of black holes, constrain the dynamics and evolution of black-hole accretion and outflows, test general…
Recently, two classes of quasar samples were identified, which are promising as new cosmological probes extending to higher redshifts. The first sample uses the nonlinear relation between the ultraviolet and X-ray luminosities of quasars to…
This paper focuses on the mission design for the Laser Astrometric Test Of Relativity (LATOR). This mission uses laser interferometry between two micro-spacecraft whose lines of sight pass close by the Sun to accurately measure deflection…
After many years of flying in space primarily for educational purposes, CubeSats - tiny satellites with form factors corresponding to arrangements of "1U" units, or cubes, each 10 cm on a side - have come into their own as valuable…
X-ray and optical observations of quadruply lensed quasars can provide a microarcsecond probe of the lensed quasar, corresponding to scale sizes of \~10^2-10^4 gravitational radii of the central black hole. This high angular resolution is…
Astrometric issues for solar system studies are discussed. An overview gives references and cover all aspects of the solar system where astrometry is important: orbits of planets, moons, asteroids and NEOs, masses of asteroids, occultations…
We have built and tested a compact, low-cost, but very-high-performance astronomical polarimeter based on a continuously rotating half-wave plate and a high-speed imaging detector. The polarimeter is suitable for small telescopes up to ~1 m…
Quasars,asextremelyluminousanddistantspecialcelestialbodiesintheuniverse,aredrivenbyacomplexsystemcomposedof supermassiveblackholesandsurroundingaccretiondisks.Thispaperadoptsatime-domainobservationstrategyandcombines the analysis of light…
Superresolution refers to the estimation of parameters of an image with an accuracy beyond standard classical techniques such as direct detection. In seminal work by Lu et al., a measurement to estimate the separation distance of two point…
Quasars accreting matter at very high rates (known as extreme Population A [xA] quasars, possibly associated with super-Eddington accreting massive black holes) may provide a new class of distance indicators covering cosmic epochs from…
There has been recent interest in quantum-mechanical tests aided by distant quasars. For two quasars of sufficient redshift at opposite directions on the sky, light-travel-time arguments can assure the acausality of their photons. And if…
Imaging point sources with low angular separation near or below the Rayleigh criterion is important in astronomy, e.g., in the search for habitable exoplanets near stars. However, the measurement time required to resolve stars in the…
The Cosmic Radio Dipole is of fundamental interest to cosmology. Recent studies revealed open questions about the nature of the observed Cosmic Radio Dipole. We use simulated source count maps to test a linear and a quadratic estimator for…
The orientation of the disk of material accreting onto supermassive black holes that power quasars is one of most important quantities that are needed to understand quasars -- both individually and in the ensemble average. We present a…
Cosmic shear is a key probe of modern cosmology. Amongst its challenges are shape noise and intrinsic alignments, both due to our ignorance of the unlensed shape of the source galaxies. I argue here that Einstein rings may be used as…
A long standing problem in weak lensing is about how to construct cosmic shear estimators from galaxy images. Conventional methods average over a single quantity per galaxy to estimate each shear component. We show that any such shear…
Galaxies are key objects for the study of cosmology, the life cycle of matter, and stellar evolution. X-ray observations have given us a new key window into these building blocks of the Universe, that allows us to investigate their hot…
Microquasars are ideal natural laboratories for understanding accretion/ejection processes, studying the physics of relativistic jets, and testing gravitational phenomena. Nevertheless, these objects are difficult to find in our Galaxy. The…
In this paper we introduce a new observable to measure cosmic shear. We show that if we can measure with good accuracy both, the orientation of a galaxy and the polarisation direction of its radio emission, the angle between them is…