Related papers: The Gaia Basic angle: measurement and variations
Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in spring 2013. There are many scientific outcomes from this mission and as far as our Solar System is concerned, the satellite will be able to map thousands of main belt asteroids (MBAs)…
Context. This study has been developed in the framework of the computational simulations executed for the preparation of the ESA Gaia astrometric mission. Aims. We focus on describing the objects and characteristics that Gaia will…
Europe's Gaia spacecraft will soon embark on its five-year mission to measure the absolute parallaxes of the complete sample of 1,000 million objects down to 20 mag. It is expected that thousands of nearby brown dwarfs will have their…
Gaia is an ambitious space observatory devoted to obtain the largest and most precise astrometric catalogue of astronomical objects from our Galaxy and beyond. On-board processing and transmission of the huge amount of data generated by the…
The Gaia satellite will observe about one billion stars and other point-like sources. The astrometric core solution will determine the astrometric parameters (position, parallax, and proper motion) for a subset of these sources, using a…
How to analyse Terabytes of photometric data, and extract knowledge on variable stars? How to detect variable phenomena? How to combine different photometric bands? Which algorithm to search for periods? How to characterize and classify the…
Galactic aberration (GA) is a small effect in proper motions of celestial objects with an amplitude of about 5 $\mu$as/yr already noticeable in highly accurate astrometric observations such as VLBI and Gaia. However accurate accounting for…
Astrometric missions like Gaia provide exceptionally precise measurements of stellar positions and proper motions. Gravitational waves traveling between the observer and distant stars can induce small, correlated shifts in these apparent…
Observational astrophysics uses sophisticated technology to collect and measure electromagnetic and other radiation from beyond the Earth. Modern observatories produce large, complex datasets and extracting the maximum possible information…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has two scientific objectives of cosmological focus: to probe the expansion rate of the universe, and to understand stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and their implications for early…
The search for extrasolar planets has developed rapidly and, today, more than 1700 planets have been found orbiting stars. Thanks to Gaia, we will collect high-accuracy astrometric orbits of thousands of new low-mass celestial objects, such…
We discuss the synergy of Gaia and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in the context of Milky Way studies. LSST can be thought of as Gaia's deep complement because the two surveys will deliver trigonometric parallax, proper-motion,…
The GBOT group is in charge of the Ground Based Optical Tracking of the Gaia satellite. In concrete terms, since the launch of Gaia, our task is to take every night, using ground based medium-class telescopes, short sequences of $10$ or…
At the heart of a successful theory of galaxy formation must be a detailed physical understanding of the dissipational processes which form spiral galaxies. To what extent can we unravel the events that produced the Galaxy as we see it…
The Galactic Exoplanet Survey Telescope (GEST) will observe a 2 square degree field in the Galactic bulge to search for extra-solar planets using a gravitational lensing technique. This gravitational lensing technique is the only method…
The inference of stellar parameters (such as radius and mass) through asteroseismic forward modelling depends on the number, accuracy, and precision of seismic and atmospheric constraints. ESA's Gaia space mission is providing precise…
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,…
The body of photometric and astrometric data on stars in the Galaxy has been growing very fast in recent years (Hipparcos/Tycho, OGLE-3, 2-Mass, DENIS, UCAC2, SDSS, RAVE, Pan Starrs, Hermes, ...) and in two years ESA will launch the Gaia…
A well constrained estimate of the distance remains one of the main factors to properly interpret the observations of accreting X-ray pulsars. Since these objects are typically well studied, multiple distance estimates obtained with…
Using redshifts as a proxy for galaxy distances, estimates of the 2D transverse peculiar velocities of distant galaxies could be obtained from future measurements of proper motions. We provide the mathematical framework for analyzing 2D…