Related papers: The Gaia-LSST Synergy
Combined studies of variable stars and stellar clusters open great horizons, and they allow us to improve our understanding of stellar cluster formation and stellar evolution. In that prospect, the Gaia mission will provide astrometric,…
ESA recently called for new "Science Ideas" to be investigated in terms of feasibility and technological developments -- for technologies not yet sufficiently mature. These ideas may in the future become candidates for M or L class missions…
Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) astrometry space mission, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. Gaia's main goal is to collect high-precision astrometric data (i.e. positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) for the brightest…
The LSST survey was designed to deliver transformative results for four primary objectives: constraining dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way.…
Strong gravitational lensing enables a wide range of science: probing cosmography; testing dark matter models; understanding galaxy evolution; and magnifying the faint, small and distant Universe. However to date exploiting strong lensing…
Gaia is a satellite mission of the European Space Agency which is creating a catalogue of extremely accurate positions, distances and space motions of two billion stars in our Galaxy, along with more than one hundred thousand solar system…
The accuracy of stellar distances inferred purely from parallaxes degrades rapidly with distance. Proper motion measurements, when combined with some idea of typical velocities, provide independent information on stellar distances. Here I…
Microlensing consists in two major effects: (1) variation in the apparent position of the background sources (astrometric component) and (2) flux variations of the background sources (photometric component). While the latter has been…
Astrometric microlensing can be used to make precise measurements of the masses of lens stars that are independent of their assumed internal physics. Such direct mass measurements, obtained purely by observing the gravitational effects of…
The sensitivity and astrometry upgrade ASTRA of the Keck Interferometer is introduced. After a brief overview of the underlying interferometric principles, the technology and concepts of the upgrade are presented. The interferometric…
The GAIA space observatory was recently approved as Cornerstone 6 of ESA's science program, to be launched no later than mid-2012. It will provide a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about 10^9 stars throughout our Galaxy (and into the…
The IACOB spectroscopic survey of Galactic OB stars is an ambitious observational project aimed at compiling a large, homogeneous, high-resolution database of optical spectra of massive stars observable from the Northern hemisphere. The…
(Abridged) We consider the scientific case for a large aperture (10-12m class) optical spectroscopic survey telescope with a field of view comparable to that of LSST. Such a facility could enable transformational progress in several areas…
In the pursuit of understanding the population of stellar remnants within the Milky Way, we analyze the sample of $\sim 950$ microlensing events observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope between 2014 and 2019. In this study we focus on a…
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…
One of the scientific goals of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is to measure the evolution of dark energy by measuring subtle distortions of galaxy shapes due to weak gravitational lensing caused by the evolving dark matter…
Context. The Gaia satellite will measure highly accurate absolute parallaxes of hundreds of millions of stars by comparing the parallactic displacements in the two fields of view of the optical instrument. The requirements on the stability…
The China Space Station Telescope (CSST) will enter a low Earth orbit around 2024 and operate for 10 years, with seven of those years devoted to surveying the area of the median-to-high Galactic latitude and median-to-high Ecliptic latitude…
In this proceeding, we show how observations of Solar System Objects with Gaia can be used to test General Relativity and to constrain modified gravitational theories. The high number of Solar System objects observed and the variety of…
Two planetary mass objects in the far outer Solar System --- collectively referred to here as Planet X --- have recently been hypothesized to explain the orbital distribution of distant Kuiper Belt Objects. Neither planet is thought to be…