Related papers: Gaia FGK Benchmark Stars and their reference param…
In the current panorama of large surveys, the vast amount of data obtained with different methods, data types, formats, and stellar samples, is making an efficient use of the available information difficult. The Survey of Surveys is a…
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…
Libraries of stellar spectra are fundamental tools in the study of stellar populations and in automatic determination of atmospheric parameters for large samples of observed stars. In the context of the present volume, here I give an…
Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a benchmark for understanding disk galaxies. It is the only galaxy whose formation history can be studied using the full distribution of stars from white dwarfs to supergiants. The oldest components provide us…
The phenomenon of spectral mimicry refers to the fact that hypergiants and post-AGB supergiants - stars of different masses in fundamentally different stages of their evolution have similar optical spectra, and also share certain other…
Gaia will obtain astrometry and spectrophotometry for essentially all sources in the sky down to a broad band magnitude limit of G=20, an expected yield of 10^9 stars. Its main scientific objective is to reveal the formation and evolution…
Motivated by the possible existence of other universes, with possible variations in the laws of physics, this paper explores the parameter space of fundamental constants that allows for the existence of stars. To make this problem…
GAIA has been approved to provide the data needed to quantify the formation and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy, and its near neighbours. That requires study of all four key Galactic stellar populations: Bulge, Halo, Thick Disk, Thin…
Binary stellar systems form a large fraction of the Galaxy's stars. They are useful as laboratories for studying the physical processes taking place within stars, and must be correctly taken into account when observations of stars are used…
Stellar variability studies are now reaching a completely new level thanks to ESA's Gaia mission, which enables us to locate many variable stars in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and determine the various instability strips/bands.…
We discuss the tracing of star formation histories with ESA's space astrometry mission GAIA, emphasizing the advantages of AGB stars for this purpose. GAIA's microarcsecond-level astrometry, multi-band photometry and spectroscopy will…
Red supergiants (RSGs), representing a kind of massive young stellar population, have rarely been used to probe the structure of the Milky Way, mainly due to the long-standing scarcity of Galactic RSG samples. The Gaia BP/RP spectra…
The second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite (Gaia DR2) revolutionised astronomy by providing accurate distances, proper motions, apparent magnitudes, and in many cases temperatures and radial velocities for an unprecedented number of…
Observing the stars in our night sky tells us that giant, supergiant and hypergiant stars hold an unique importance in the understanding of stellar populations. Theoretical stellar models predict a rich tapestry of evolved stars. These…
Galaxy masses play a fundamental role in our understanding of structure formation models. This review addresses the variety and reliability of mass estimators that pertain to stars, gas, and dark matter. The different sections on masses…
Gaia is an ambitious ESA space mission which will provide photometric and astrometric measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a kinematic census of almost one billion stars in our Galaxy. These data will revolutionize our…
The wealth of information in the Gaia catalogue of exoplanets will constitute a fundamental contribution to several hot topics of the astrophysics of planetary systems. I briefly review the potential impact of Gaia micro-arsec astrometry in…
Gaia will be ESA's milestone astrometric mission, and is due for launch at the end of 2013. Gaia will repeatedly map the whole sky measuring about one billion sources to V=20-22 mag. Its data products will be {\mu}as accuracy astrometry,…
Understanding the atmospheric parameters of stars on the top of the RGB is essential to reveal the chemical composition of the Milky Way, as they can be used to probe the farthest parts of our Galaxy. Our goal is to determine the chemical…
An accurate and precise Kepler Stellar Properties Catalog is essential for the interpretation of the Kepler exoplanet survey results. Previous Kepler Stellar Properties Catalogs have focused on reporting the best-available parameters for…