Related papers: A New Method to Calibrate the Stellar Color/Surfac…
We present a new calibration of the seven-color Vilnius system in terms of [Fe/H], applicable to F-M stars in the metallicity range -2.8<[Fe/H]<+0.5. We employ a purely empirical approach, based on ~1000 calibrating stars with…
Cross-correlations between the galaxy number density in a lensing source sample and that in an overlapping spectroscopic sample can in principle be used to calibrate the lensing source redshift distribution. In this paper, we study in…
We present improved methods for using stars found in astronomical exposures to calibrate both star and galaxy colors as well as to adjust the instrument flat field. By developing a spectroscopic model for the SDSS stellar locus in…
It is well known that the polarization signal in microlensing events of hot stars is larger than that of main-sequence stars. Most hot stars rapidly rotate around their stellar axes. The stellar rotation makes ellipticity and…
During some gravitational lensing events, the lens transits the face of the star. This causes a shift in the apparent radial velocity of the star which is proportional to its rotation speed. It also changes the magnification relative to…
We determine the parameters of scaling relations analogous to the Fundamental Plane of elliptical galaxies for the bulges and disks of a sample of 40 spiral galaxies. To this end we derive structural parameters (scalelengths and surface…
Surface brightness -- colour relations (SBCRs) are very useful tools for predicting the angular diameters of stars. They offer the possibility to calculate very precise spectrophotometric distances by the eclipsing binary method or the…
We introduce a novel method to measure the masses of galaxy clusters at high redshift selected from optical and IR Spitzer data via the red-sequence technique. Lyman-break galaxies are used as a well understood, high-redshift background…
When characterizing a high resolution echelle spectrograph, for instance for precise Doppler work, it is useful to observe featureless sources such as quartz lamps or hot stars to determine the response of the instrument. Such sources…
Current cosmological analyses which use Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) observations combine SN samples to expand the redshift range beyond that of a single sample and increase the overall sample size. The inhomogeneous photometric calibration…
As a planet transits the face of a star, it accelerates along the line-of-sight. The changing delay in the propagation of photons produces an apparent deceleration of the planet across the sky throughout the transit. This persistent…
Calibration is one of the long-standing problems in optical interferometric measurements, particularly with long baselines which demand stars with angular sizes on the milliarcsecond scale and no detectable companions. While systems of…
Understanding the evolution of the Milky Way calls for the precise abundance determination of many elements in many stars. A common perception is that deriving more than a few elemental abundances ([Fe/H], [$\alpha$/Fe], perhaps [C/H],…
High-accuracy astrometry permits the determination of not only stellar tangential motion, but also the component along the line-of-sight. Such non-spectroscopic (i.e. astrometric) radial velocities are independent of stellar atmospheric…
Microlensing observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…
Michelson phase and Hanbury Brown-Twiss intensity stellar interferometry require expressions for the first- and second-order correlation functions, respectively, of the fields radiated by stars in terms of their diameters and measured…
RR Lyrae stars play a central role in tracing phase-space structures within the Milky Way because they are easy to identify, are relatively luminous, and are found in large numbers in the Galactic bulge, disk, and halo. In this work, we…
Previous calculations of the rates and optical depths due to microlensing only considered resolved stars. However, if a faint unresolved star lens is close enough to a resolved star, the event will be seen by the microlensing experiments…
We analyze the lightcurve of the microlensing event OGLE-2003-BLG-175/MOA-2003-BLG-45 and show that it has two properties that, when combined with future high resolution astrometry, could lead to a direct, accurate measurement of the lens…
We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…