Related papers: On the accuracy of close stellar approaches determ…
A deep understanding of the Milky Way galaxy, its formation and evolution requires observations of huge numbers of stars. Stellar photometry, therefore, provides an economical method to obtain intrinsic stellar parameters. With the addition…
We cross-match objects from several different astronomical catalogs to determine the absolute proper proper motions of stars within the 30-arcmin radius fields of 115 Milky-Way globular clusters with the accuracy of 1--2~mas/yr. The proper…
(abridged) The Hundred-Thousand-Proper-Motion (HTPM) project will determine the proper motions of ~113500 stars using a 23-year baseline. The proper motions will use the Hipparcos data, with epoch 1991.25, as first epoch and the first…
Context. Astrometric gravitational microlensing can be used to determine the mass of a single star (the lens) with an accuracy of a few percent. To do so, precise measurements of the angular separations between lens and background star with…
Estimating a distance by inverting a parallax is only valid in the absence of noise. As most stars in the Gaia catalogue will have non-negligible fractional parallax errors, we must treat distance estimation as a constrained inference…
Typically we can deliver astrometric positions of natural satellites with errors in the 50-150 mas range. Apparent distances from mutual phenomena, have much smaller errors, less than 10 mas. However, this method can only be applied during…
Astrometry from the Gaia satellite and from the long-term combination of Hipparcos and Gaia are now sensitive to sky-plane accelerations as low as $\approx$1 m/s/yr. This paper quantifies and explores an important caveat: apparent nonlinear…
We have derived accurate distances to Galactic globular clusters by combining data from the Gaia Early Data Release 3 with distances based on Hubble Space telescope HST data and literature based distances. We determine distances either…
Considerable progress has been made in determining the Hubble constant over the past two decades. We discuss the cosmological context and importance of an accurate measurement of the Hubble constant, and focus on six high-precision…
Sun-like stars are well represented in the solar neighbourhood but are currently under-utilised, with many studies of chemical and kinematic evolution focusing on red giants (which can be observed further away) or turn-off stars (which have…
The Gaia space mission is crafting revolutionary astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic catalogues that will allow us to map our Galaxy, but only if we know the completeness of this Gaia-verse of catalogues: what stars does it contain…
High-precision astrometry on sub-micro-arcsecond level in angular resolution requires accurate determination of the trajectory of a light-signal from the celestial light source through the gravitational field of the Solar system toward the…
The determination of accurate distances to star-forming regions are discussed in the broader historical context of astronomical distance measurements. We summarize recent results for regions within 1 kpc and present perspectives for the…
We have been doing a sample survey in UBV photometry and proper motions as part of an investigation of galactic structure and evolution. The programme is based on Schmidt plates (from OCA, Tautenburg, Palomar and ESO Schmidt telescopes)…
Major advancements in space science and detector technology brought about a revolution in global astrometry, the science of measuring distances and motions of stars in the Milky Way and in the local universe. From the first ESA astrometric…
We performed a spectroscopic survey of nearly 700 stars probing the galactic thick disc far from the solar neighbourhood towards the galactic coordinates (l~277, b~47). The derived effective temperatures, surface gravities and overall…
The census of stellar and substellar companions of nearby stars is largely incomplete. It is, however, fundamentally important in the understanding of the stellar and planetary formation and evolution mechanisms. We aim to characterize the…
Radio weak lensing, while a highly promising complementary probe to optical weak lensing, will require incredible precision in the measurement of galaxy shape parameters. In this paper, we extend the Bayesian Inference for Radio…
Context. Due to our increasing knowledge on the Galactic and stellar neighborhood of the Solar System, modern long-period comet motion studies have to take into account both stellar perturbations and the overall Galactic potential. Aims.…
Abridged: The golden age of astrophysics is upon us with both grand discoveries (extra-solar planets, dark matter, dark energy) and precision cosmology. Fundamental understanding of the working of stars and galaxies is within reach, thanks…