Related papers: The Gaia Mission, Binary Stars and Exoplanets
During some thirty years, 1980-2010, technical studies of optical interferometry from instruments in space were pursued as promising for higher spatial resolution and for higher astrometric accuracy. Nulling interferometry was studied for…
Planck was successfully launched on May 14th, 2009, from the Kourou space port, in French Guyana. After recalling the objectives that we set out - back in 1996 - to fulfill with this project, I recall some of the technological breakthroughs…
Gaia will provide parallaxes and proper motions with accuracy ranging from 10 to 1000 microarcsecond on up to one billion stars. Most of these will be disk stars: for an unreddened K giant at 6 kpc, it will measure the distance accurate to…
Gaia is a revolutionary space mission developed by ESA and is delivering 5 parameter astrometry, photometry and radial velocities over the whole sky with astrometric accuracies down to a few tens of micro-arcseconds. A weakness of Gaia is…
This is the fourth in a series of papers that aim both to provide reasonable orbits for a number of eclipsing binaries and to evaluate the expected performance of Gaia of these objects and the accuracy that is achievable in the…
The Gaia all-sky astrometric survey is challenged by several issues affecting the spacecraft stability. Amongst them, we find the focus evolution, straylight and basic angle variations Contrary to pre-launch expectations, the image quality…
The first results of a new survey are reported, which explores the 2nd data release of the ESA-Gaia mission, in order to search for stellar companions of (Community) TESS Objects of Interest and to characterize their properties. In total,…
The Gaia mission has triggered major developments in the field of Galactic dynamics in recent years, which we discuss in this review. The structure and kinematics of all Galactic components - disc, bar/bulge and halo - are now mapped in…
At about 1000 days after the launch of Gaia we present the first Gaia data release, Gaia DR1, consisting of astrometry and photometry for over 1 billion sources brighter than magnitude 20.7. We summarize Gaia DR1 and provide illustrations…
Gaia is an astrometric space experiment that is measuring positions, proper motions as well as parallaxes for a huge number of stars. It operates a medium-dispersion spectrometer, the RVS, that provides spectra and thus radial velocity…
The satellite missions Hipparcos and Gaia by the European Space Agency will together bring a decrease of astrometric errors by a factor 10000, four orders of magnitude, more than was achieved during the preceding 500 years. This modern…
The final astrometric data from the Gaia mission will transform our view of the stellar content of the Galaxy, particularly when complemented with spectroscopic surveys providing stellar parameters, line-of-sight kinematics and elemental…
Gaia Data Release 1 (Gaia DR1) contains astrometric results for more than 1 billion stars brighter than magnitude 20.7 based on observations collected by the Gaia satellite during the first 14 months of its operational phase. We give a…
Accurate stellar masses are requested in order to improve our understanding of stellar interiors, but they are still rather rare. Fortunately, the forthcoming Gaia Mission will provide astrometric measurements permitting the derivation of…
Context: Many if not most planetary nebulae (PNe) are now thought to be the outcome of binary evolutionary scenarios. However only a few percent of PNe in the Milky Way are known to host binary systems. The high precision repeated observing…
Hipparcos, the first ever experiment of global astrometry, was launched by ESA in 1989 and its results published in 1997 (Perryman et al., Astron. Astrophys. 323, L49, 1997; Perryman & ESA (eds), The Hipparcos and Tycho catalogues, ESA…
In this communication, we show how asteroids observations from the Gaia mission can be used to perform local tests of General Relativity (GR). This ESA mission, launched in December 2013, will observe --in addition to the stars-- a large…
In this article we present an overview of the ESA Gaia mission and of the unprecedented impact that Gaia will have on the field of variable star research. We summarise the contents and impact of the first Gaia data release on the…
The results of the Gaia mission will have tremendous influence on many topics in white dwarf research. In this paper the current status of the Gaia mission is described. At the end a short outlook on the release scenario and the expected…
The scientific output of the proposed EChO mission (in terms of spectroscopic characterization of the atmospheres of transiting extrasolar planets) will be maximized by a careful selection of targets and by a detailed characterization of…