Related papers: Interferometry from Space: A Great Dream
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), with its launch date planned for 2005, has as its goal astrometry with ~ 1 micro-arcsecond accuracy for stars as faint as 20th mag. If the SIM lives to expectations it can be used to measure…
Imaging the direct light signal from a faint exoplanet against the overwhelming glare of its host star presents one of the fundamental challenges to modern astronomical instrumentation. Achieving sufficient signal-to-noise for detection by…
Over the last three decades, an exceptionally good science case has been made for pursuing gravitational wave (GW) astronomy. This has engendered a worldwide effort to detect the extremely weak signals generated by expected sources. With…
Since the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the observation of gravitational waves, it is fair to say that the epoch of gravitational wave astronomy (GWs) has begun. However, a number of interesting sources of GWs can only be…
Gaia is ESA's ambitious space astrometry mission the main objective of which is to astrometrically and spectro-photometrically map 1000 Million celestial objects (mostly in our galaxy) with unprecedented accuracy. The announcement of…
(Abridged) A consequence of the Earth's motion with respect to the CMB is that over a 10 year period it will travel a distance of ~800 AU. As first noted by Kardashev in 1986, this baseline can be used to carry out astrometric measurements…
Intensity interferometry for astrophysical observations has gained increasing interest in the last decade. The method of correlating photon fluxes at different telescopes for high resolution astronomy without access to the phase of the…
Within the last 10 years, long-baseline optical interferometry (LBOI) has benefited significantly from increased sensitivity, spatial resolution, and spectral resolution, e.g., measuring the diameters and asymmetries of single stars,…
Access to microarcsecond astrometry is now routine in the radio, infrared, and optical domains. In particular the publication of the second data release from the Gaia mission made it possible for every astronomer to work with easily…
The Gaia satellite, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, is the next generation astrometry mission following Hipparcos. Gaia's primary science goal is to determine the kinematics, chemical structure and evolution…
The space-based Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be able to observe the gravitational-wave signals from systems comprised of a massive black hole and a stellar-mass compact object. These systems are known as extreme-mass-ratio…
The Gaia astrometric mission - the Hipparcos successor - is described in some detail, with its three instruments: the two (spectro)photometers (BP and RP) covering the range 330-1050 nm, the white light (G-band) imager dedicated to…
The Gaia mission is expected to provide highly accurate astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic measurements for about $10^9$ objects. Automated classification of detected sources is a key part of the data processing. Here a few aspects…
Ultra-high angular resolution in astronomy has always been an important vehicle for making fundamental discoveries. Recent results in direct imaging of the vicinity of the supermassive black hole in the nucleus of the radio galaxy M87 by…
In 1953 I heard of an experiment in 1925 by Bengt Str\"omgren where he observed transit times with the meridian circle at the Copenhagen University Observatory measuring the current in a photocell behind slits when a star was crossing. In…
The ultimate astronomical observatory would be a formation flying interferometer in space, immune to atmospheric turbulence and absorption, free from atmospheric and telescope thermal emission, and reconfigurable to adjust baselines…
On the 19th of December 2013, the Gaia spacecraft was successfully launched by a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana and started its amazing journey to map and characterise one billion celestial objects with its one billion pixel camera. In…
Optical imaging with microarcsecond resolution will reveal details across and outside stellar surfaces but requires kilometer-scale interferometers, challenging to realize either on the ground or in space. Intensity interferometry,…
The Gaia satellite, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, is the next generation astrometry mission following Hipparcos. While mapping the whole sky, the Gaia space mission is expected to discover thousands of Solar…
A space-based far-infrared interferometer could work synergistically with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to revolutionize our understanding of the astrophysical processes leading to the…