Related papers: Gaia reference frame amid quasar variability and p…
A recent paper demonstrated the existence of a secular aberration drift term in stellar proper motions that arises when transforming an astrometric catalogue defined for an observer at rest with respect to the solar system barycentre to…
Quasars are often considered to be point-like objects. This is largely true and allows for an excellent alignment of the optical positional reference frame of the ongoing ESA mission Gaia with the International Celestial Reference Frame.…
Gaia data release 2 (DR2) provides the best non-rotating optical frame aligned with the radio frame (ICRF) thanks to the inclusion of about half-million quasars in the 5-parameter astrometric solution. Given their crucial diagnostic role…
Recent work has shown that optical-radio position offsets and radio position variability are inversely correlated with the photometric variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN). A key prediction of these findings is that a reference frame…
After a short review of experimental foundations of metric theories of gravity, the choice of general relativity as a theory to be used for the routine modeling of Gaia observations is justified. General principles of relativistic modeling…
Astrophysical space missions deliver invaluable information about our universe, stellar dynamics of our galaxy, and motion of celestial bodies in the solar system. Astrometric space missions SIM and Gaia will determine distances to stars…
The second release of Gaia data (Gaia DR2) contains the astrometric parameters for more than half a million quasars. This set defines a kinematically non-rotating reference frame in the optical domain referred to as the Gaia-CRF2. The…
As part of the data processing for Gaia Data Release~1 (Gaia DR1) a special astrometric solution was computed, the so-called auxiliary quasar solution. This gives positions for selected extragalactic objects, including radio sources in the…
Astrometric positions of moving objects in the Solar System have been measured using a variety of star catalogs in the past. Previous work has shown that systematic errors in star catalogs can affect the accuracy of astrometric…
Positions and proper motions of Gaia sources are expressed in a reference frame that ideally should be non-rotating relative to distant extragalactic objects, coincident with the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS), and…
We employ differential astrometric methods to establish a small field reference frame stable at the micro-arcsecond ($\mu$as) level on short timescales using high-cadence simulated observations taken by Gaia in February 2017 of a bright…
We use methods of differential astrometry to construct a small field inertial reference frame stable at the micro-arcsecond level. Such a high level of astrometric precision can be expected with the end-of-mission standard errors to be…
We present the first high-precision proper motion catalog, tied to the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS), of infrared astrometric reference stars within R $\leq$ 25" (1 pc) of the central supermassive black hole at the…
During the last years, much attention has been paid to the astrometric implications of the galactic aberration in proper motions (GA). This effect causes systematic errors in astrometric measurements at a microarcsecond level. Some authors…
Gaia used a large sample of photometrically selected active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars to remove the residual spin of its global proper motion system in order to achieve a maximally inertial reference frame. A small fraction of…
The Hipparcos catalog provides the first epoch of the celestial reference frame (CRF) in the optical domain and serves as an indispensable tool to verify and improve the Gaia CRF for the brighter stars ($V<11$ mag) and to identify the…
The proper motion (also known as position drift) field of extragalactic sources at cosmological distances across our sky can be used to measure the acceleration of the Solar System through the aberration effect. If measured very precisely,…
Gaia's astrometric solution aims to determine at least five parameters for each star, together with appropriate estimates of their uncertainties and correlations. This requires at least five distinct observations per star. In the early data…
Gaia-CRF3 is the celestial reference frame for positions and proper motions in the third release of data from the Gaia mission, Gaia DR3 (and for the early third release, Gaia EDR3, which contains identical astrometric results). The…
Gaia Data Release 2 (Gaia DR2) contains results for 1693 million sources in the magnitude range 3 to 21 based on observations collected by the European Space Agency Gaia satellite during the first 22 months of its operational phase. We…