Related papers: Gaia reference frame amid quasar variability and p…
The Gaia satellite was selected as a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) in October 2000 and confirmed in 2002 with a current target launch date of 2011. The Gaia mission will gather on the same observational principles…
Gaia is an astrometric space experiment that is measuring positions, proper motions as well as parallaxes for a huge number of stars. It operates a medium-dispersion spectrometer, the RVS, that provides spectra and thus radial velocity…
Context. The precise determinations of stellar mass at $\sim$1% provide important constraints on stellar evolution models. Accurate parallax measurements can also serve as independent benchmarks for the next Gaia data release. Aims. We aim…
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…
We give an assessment of the significance of various known effects which may produce genuine fluctuations of star positions comparable to or larger than Gaia's measurement noise, and which thus may limit the ultimately reachable precision…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically hundreds of thousands of main-sequence stars within $\approx200$ pc, looking for the presence of giant planetary companions within a few AUs from their host stars. Indeed, Gaia…
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 ESA cornerstone mission Gaia was successfully launched in 2013, and is now scanning the sky to accurately measure the positions and motions of about two billion point-like sources of 3<V<20.5 mag, with the main goal of reconstructing…
Gaia DR2 published positions, parallaxes and proper motions for an unprecedented 1,331,909,727 sources, revolutionising the field of Galactic dynamics. We complement this data with the Astrometry Spread Function (ASF), the expected…
In this article we outline the structure of a general relativistic astrometric model which has been developed to deduce the position and proper motion of stars from 1-microarcsecond optical observations made by an astrometric satellite…
The analyses of high precision astrometric surveys, such as Gaia, implicitly assume a modern version of Mach's Principle: the local inertial frame of our Solar System should be non-rotating in the frame of distant quasars. On the contrary,…
Launch of the Gaia space observatory started a new era in astrometry when the accuracy of star coordinates increased by thousands of times. Significant improvement of accuracy was also expected for the coordinates of the Solar system…
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…
The Gaia satellite, to be launched in 2012, will offer an unprecedented survey of the whole sky down to magnitude 20. The multi-epoch nature of the mission provides a unique opportunity to study variable sources with their astrometric,…
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…
Context. The first Gaia Data Release contains the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS). This is a subset of about 2 million stars for which, besides the position and photometry, the proper motion and parallax are calculated using…
Secular extragalactic parallax caused by the solar system's velocity relative to the cosmic microwave background rest frame may be observable as a dipole proper motion field with amplitude $78~\mu$as yr$^{-1}$ Mpc. Nearby galaxies also…
In this paper we develop a differential astrometric framework that is appropriate for a scanning space satellite such as Gaia. We apply it to the first of the GAREQ fields, which is the fruit of dedicated efforts within the Gaia project…
Most binaries are undetected. Astrometric reductions of a system using the assumption that the object moves like a single point mass can be biased by unresolved binary stars. The discrepancy between the centre of mass of the system (which…
Grid stars and reference stars provide the fundamental global and local astrometric reference frames for observations by the Space Interferometry Mission. They must therefore be astrometrically stable at the ~1 uas level. I present simple…