Related papers: A statistical analysis of two-dimensional patterns…
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 is a fully-approved all-sky astrometric and photometric survey due for launch in 2011. It will measure accurate parallaxes and proper motions for everything brighter than G=20 (ca. 10^9 stars). Its primary objective is to study the…
This is a summary of the `Astronomy Perspective' of the 4th meeting on 'Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy' held at Penn State University in June 2006. We comment on trends in the Astronomy community towards Bayesian methods and…
Microlensing light curves are now being monitored with the precision required to detect small perturbations due to planetary companions of the primary lens. Microlensing is complementary to other planetary search techniques in its potential…
Follow the big stars! I review the theory of detection and parameter measurement of planetary systems by follow-up observations of ongoing microlensing events. Two parameters can generically be measured from the event itself: the…
Modelling is essential for studies that quantify the impact from satellite downlinks on radio astronomy sites. To estimate this impact it is necessary to know not only the position and velocity of satellites but also their behaviour in the…
The ESA global astrometry space mission Gaia has been monitoring the position of a billion stars since 2014. The analysis of such a massive dataset is challenging in terms of the data processing involved. In particular, the blind detection…
The upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will detect a large gravitational-wave foreground of Galactic white dwarf binaries. These sources are exceptional for their probable detection at electromagnetic wavelengths, some long…
The target of many astronomical studies is the recovery of tiny astrophysical signals living in a sea of uninteresting (but usually dominant) noise. In many contexts (i.e., stellar time-series, or high-contrast imaging, or stellar…
The paper develops a method for detecting optical binary stars based on the use of astrometric catalogs in combination with machine learning (ML) methods. A computational experiment was carried out on the example of the HIPPARCOS mission…
The gravitational pull of an unseen companion to a luminous star is well-known to cause deviations to the parallax and proper motion of a star. In a previous paper in this series, we argue that the astrometric mission Gaia can identify…
We derive a Bayesian framework for incorporating selection effects into population analyses. We allow for both measurement uncertainty in individual measurements and, crucially, for selection biases on the population of measurements, and…
Many estimation problems in astrophysics are highly complex, with high-dimensional, non-standard data objects (e.g., images, spectra, entire distributions, etc.) that are not amenable to formal statistical analysis. To utilize such data and…
I describe a Bayesian method to account for measurement errors in linear regression of astronomical data. The method allows for heteroscedastic and possibly correlated measurement errors, and intrinsic scatter in the regression…
We present a new approach for modelling galaxy/halo bias that utilizes the full non-linear information contained in the moments of the matter density field, which we derive using a set of numerical simulations. Although our method is…
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 systematic magnification of background sources by the weak gravitational-lensing effects of foreground matter, also called cosmic magnification, is becoming an efficient tool both for measuring cosmological parameters and for exploring…
Microlensing is now a very popular observational astronomical technique. The investigations accessible through this effect range from the dark matter problem to the search for extra-solar planets. In this review, the techniques to search…
The future space based gravitational wave detector LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) will observe millions of Galactic binaries constantly present in the data stream. A small fraction of this population (of the order of several…
The ESA Cornerstone Mission GAIA, to be launched prior to 2012 and with a nominal lifetime of 5 years, will improve the accuracy of Hipparcos astrometry by more than two orders of magnitude. GAIA high-precision global astrometric…