Related papers: On Pulsar Distance Measurements and their Uncertai…
The transverse velocity of a spiral galaxy can be measured to an accuracy $\sim 60\,\kms$ by making parallax observations of quasars being microlensed by stars in the disk of the galaxy. To make the measurement, a quasar must be located…
The location of objects on the celestial sphere is a fundamental measurement in astronomy, and the distribution of these objects within the Milky Way is important for understanding their evolution as well as the large scale structure of the…
The cosmic distance duality relation is a milestone of cosmology involving the luminosity and angular diameter distances. Any departure of the relation points to new physics or systematic errors in the observations, therefore tests of the…
We first review the current knowledge of Hipparcos systematic and random errors, in particular small-scale correlations. Then, assuming Gaussian parallax errors and using examples from the recent Hipparcos literature, we show how random…
We investigate the possibility of identifying massive objects (lenses) in the Galactic Center region (GC) by means of pulsar timing. The well known intensity change due to microlensing is found to be less important. For typical stellar…
Recently, GRAVITY onboard the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) first spatially resolved the structure of the quasar 3C 273 with an unprecedented resolution of $\sim 10\mu$as. A new method of measuring parallax distances has been…
We consider the time derivatives of the period $P$ of pulsars at the Galactic Center due to variations in their orbital Doppler shifts. We show that in conjunction with a measurement of a pulsar's proper motion and its projected separation…
We analyze pulsar fluxes at 1400 MHz ($S_{1400}$) and distances ($d$) extracted from the Parkes Multibeam Survey. Under the assumption that distribution of pulsar luminosities is distance-independent, we find that either (a) pulsar fluxes…
We have developed a method to determine the most reliable distances for a large group of planetary nebulae. For this purpose, we analyze the distances obtained from \textit{Gaia} parallaxes and three determinations of statistical distances.…
Using the Very Long Baseline Array, we have made astrometric observations of the binary pulsar B1913+16 spanning an 18 month period in 2014 - 2015. From these observations we make the first determination of the annual geometric parallax of…
We show that space-based microlensing experiments can recover lens masses and distances for a large fraction of all events (those with individual photometric errors <~ 0.01 mag) using a combination of one-dimensional microlens parallaxes…
We derive Bayesian distances for all stars in the RV sample of Gaia DR2, and use the statistical method of Schoenrich, Binney & Asplund(2012) to validate the distances and test the Gaia parallaxes. In contrast to other methods, which rely…
The standard cosmological parallax--distance formula, as found in the literature, including text-books and reference books on cosmology, requires a correction. This correction stems from the fact that in the standard text-book derivation it…
Polarisation measurements of pulsars offer an unique insight into the geometry of the emission regions in the neutron star magnetosphere. Therefore, they provide observational constraints on the different models proposed for the pulsar…
During the past decade or so, measurements of Galactic HI absorption using VLBI against extra-galactic sources, as well as multi-epoch observatios in pulsar directions, have detected small-scale transverse variations corresponding to tens…
A major problem in the interpretation of microlensing events is that the only measured quantity, the Einstein time scale t_E, is a degenerate combination of the three quantities one would like to know, the mass, distance, and speed of the…
We report a significant detection of weak, tangential distortion of the images of cosmologically distant, faint galaxies due to gravitational lensing by foreground galaxies. A mean image polarisation of $<p>=0.011\pm 0.006$ is measured for…
We have studied the radial distribution and luminosity function of normal pulsars in the Galaxy, on the basis of the ATNF Pulsar Catalogue where the distances are calculated according to the new electron density model NE2001. We show that…
We present a method to estimate distances to stars with spectroscopically derived stellar parameters. The technique is a Bayesian approach with likelihood estimated via comparison of measured parameters to a grid of stellar isochrones, and…
We investigate the possibility that a statistical detection of the galaxy parallax shift due to the Earth's motion with respect to the CMB frame (cosmic secular parallax) could be made by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space…