Related papers: Impact of basic angle variations on the parallax z…
The ESA Gaia mission uses two telescopes to create the most ambitious survey of the Galaxy. The angle between them must be known with exquisite precision and accuracy. An interferometer: the Basic Angle Monitoring system measures its…
A critical assessment of the quality of the Hipparcos data, partly supported by a completely new analysis of the raw data, is presented with the aim of clarifying reliability issues that have surfaced since the publication of the Hipparcos…
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,…
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…
The measurement of the positions, distances, motions and luminosities of stars represents the foundations of modern astronomical knowledge. Launched at the end of the eighties, the ESA Hipparcos satellite was the first space mission…
Gaia's very accurate astrometric measurements will allow the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) to be improved by a few orders of magnitude in the optical. Several sets of quasars are used to define a kinematically stable…
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…
Gaia is an all sky, high precision astrometric and photometric satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) due for launch in 2010-2011. Its primary mission is to study the composition, formation and evolution of our Galaxy. Gaia will…
We first review the current knowledge of Hipparcos systematic and random errors, in particular small-scale correlations. Then, assuming Gaussian parallax errors and using examples from the recent Hipparcos literature, we show how random…
The second Gaia data release (GDR2) provides precise five-parameter astrometric data (positions, proper motions and parallaxes) for an unprecedented amount of sources (more than $1.3$ billion, mostly stars). The use of this wealth of…
Astrometric detection of an unseen companion is based on analysis of apparent motion of its host star around the system's barycentre. Systems with orbital period close to one year may escape detection if orbital motion of their host stars…
Refined astrometry measurements allow us to detect large-scale deviations from isotropy through real-time observations of changes in the angular separation between sources at cosmic distances. This "cosmic parallax" effect is a powerful…
Cosmic parallax is the change of angular separation between pair of sources at cosmological distances induced by an anisotropic expansion. An accurate astrometric experiment like Gaia could observe or put constraints on cosmic parallax.…
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…
Gaia Early Data Release 3 (Gaia EDR3) gives trigonometric parallaxes for nearly 1.5 billion sources. Inspection of the EDR3 data for sources identified as quasars reveals that their parallaxes are biased, that is systematically offset from…
Context. Asymptotic Giant Branch stars are characterised by complex stellar surface dynamics that affect the measurements and amplify the uncertainties on stellar parameters. The resulting motion of the stellar photo-center could have…
We use 612 single stars with previously published trigonometric parallaxes placing them within 25 pc to evaluate parallaxes released in Gaia's first data release (DR1). We find that the Gaia parallaxes are, on average, $0.24 \pm 0.02$ mas…
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…
Surface brightness asymmetries are a very common feature of stars. Among other effects they cause a difference between the projected barycentre and photocentre. The evolution of those surface features makes this difference time-dependent.…
The Gaia optical astrometric mission has measured the precise positions of millions of objects in the sky, including extragalactic sources also observed by Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). In the recent Gaia EDR3 release, an effect…