Related papers: Climbing the cosmic ladder with stellar twins
In determining the distances to stars within the Milky Way galaxy, one often uses photometric or spectroscopic parallax. In these methods, the type of each individual star is determined, and the absolute magnitude of that star type is…
Since the release of the Hipparcos catalog in 1997, the distance to the Pleiades open cluster has been heavily debated. The distance obtained from Hipparcos and those by alternative methods differ by 10 to 15 %. As accurate stellar…
We infer distances and their asymmetric uncertainties for two million stars using the parallaxes published in the Gaia DR1 (GDR1) catalogue. We do this with two distance priors: A minimalist, isotropic prior assuming an exponentially…
Spectrophotometric distances to stars observed by large spectroscopic surveys offer a crucial complement to parallax distances that remain very important also after the future Gaia data releases. Here we present a probabilistic approach to…
A most desirable feature of a standard candle to estimate astronomical distances is robustness against changes in metallicity and age. It is argued that the radii of main sequence stars with spectral types from solar to A0 show predictable…
For the vast majority of stars in the second Gaia data release, reliable distances cannot be obtained by inverting the parallax. A correct inference procedure must instead be used to account for the nonlinearity of the transformation and…
We apply the twin method to determine parallaxes to 232,545 stars of the RAVE survey using the parallaxes of Gaia DR1 as a reference. To search for twins in this large dataset, we apply the t-stochastic neighbour embedding t-SNE projection…
Stellar distances constitute a foundational pillar of astrophysics. The publication of 1.47 billion stellar parallaxes from Gaia is a major contribution to this. Yet despite Gaia's precision, the majority of these stars are so distant or…
Solar twins are stars of key importance to the field of astronomy and offer a multitude of science applications. Only a small number ($\lesssim200$) of solar twins are known today, all of which are relatively close to our Sun…
This paper contains the list of Hipparcos eclipsing binaries that fulfill the following conditions: the star is classified in the Hipparcos Catalogue as EA-type eclipsing binary and its parallax is either larger than 5 mas or it is five…
Astrometric surveys such as Gaia and LSST will measure parallaxes for hundreds of millions of stars. Yet they will not measure a single distance. Rather, a distance must be estimated from a parallax. In this didactic article, I show that…
I used the 2.4 m Hiltner telescope at MDM Observatory in an attempt to measure trigonometric parallaxes for 14 cataclysmic variable stars. Techniques are described in detail. In the best cases the parallax uncertainties are below 1 mas, and…
Precise measurement of the fundamental parameters of stellar systems, including mass and radius, depends critically on how well the stellar distances are known. Astrometry from space provides parallax measurements of unprecented accuracy,…
The growing ``Hubble tension'' has prompted the need for precise measurements of cosmological distances. This paper demonstrates a purely geometric approach for determining the distance to extragalactic binaries through a joint analysis of…
We compare the absolute visual magnitude of the majority of bright O stars in the sky as predicted from their spectral type with the absolute magnitude calculated from their apparent magnitude and the Hipparcos parallax. We find that many…
For application to surveys of interstellar matter and Galactic structure, we compute new spectrophotometric distances to 139 OB stars frequently used as background targets for UV spectroscopy. Many of these stars have updated spectral types…
We present "augustus", a catalog of distance, extinction, and stellar parameter estimates to 170 million stars from $14\,{\rm mag} < r < 20\,{\rm mag}$ and with $|b| > 10^\circ$ drawing on a combination of optical to near-IR photometry from…
Accurately determining the properties of stars is of prime importance for characterizing stellar populations in our Galaxy. The field of asteroseismology has been thought to be particularly successful in such an endeavor for stars in…
A significant number of double stars with separations up to 2.5 arcsec are present in the Gaia Data Release 1 astrometric catalogs. Limiting our analysis to a well-studied sample of 1124 doubles resolved by Hipparcos, provided 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…