Related papers: Unrecognized Astrometric Confusion in the Galactic…
<<>> Among the components of the infrared and submillimetre sky background, the closest layer is the thermal emission of dust particles and minor bodies in the Solar System. This contribution is especially important for current and future…
Cosmological observables rely heavily on summary statistics such as two-point correlation functions. In many practical cases (e.g. the weak-lensing cosmic shear), those correlation functions are estimated from a finite, discrete sample of…
We present significantly improved proper motion measurements of the Milky Way's central stellar cluster. These improvements are made possible by refining our astrometric reference frame with a new geometric optical distortion model for the…
The evidence for the presence of a concentration of dark matter at the Galactic center is now very compelling. There is no question that the stellar and gas kinematics within 0.01 pc is dominated by under-luminous matter in the form of…
The inner few parsecs at the Galactic Center have come under intense scrutiny in recent years, in part due to the exciting broad-band observations of this region, but also because of the growing interest from theorists motivated to study…
Maximizing the utility of upcoming photometric cluster surveys requires a thorough understanding of the richness-mass relation of galaxy clusters. We use Monte Carlo simulations to study the impact of various sources of observational…
The origin of the X-ray emission from the central region of the Galaxy has remained a mystery, despite extensive study over the past two decades. A fundamental question is the relative contribution of the point-source and diffuse components…
The measurement of shape parameters of sources in astronomical images is usually performed by assuming that the underlying noise is uncorrelated. Spatial noise correlation is however present in practice due to various observational effects…
For the last fifteen years, the limiting noise source at the low frequency end of the sensitivity window for space gravitational wave detectors has been expected to be the confusion background of overlapping galactic binary stars. Here, we…
For ground-based optical imaging with current CCD technology, the Poisson fluctuations in source and sky background photon arrivals dominate the noise budget and are readily estimated. Another component of noise, however, is the signal from…
Recent ISO-data has allowed for the first time observationally based estimates for source confusion in mid-infrared surveys. We use the extragalactic source counts from ISOCAM in conjunction with K-band counts to predict the confusion due…
Stars on eccentric orbits around a massive black hole (MBH) emit bursts of gravitational waves (GWs) at periapse. Such events may be directly resolvable in the Galactic centre. However, if the star does not spiral in, the emitted GWs are…
We examine the effect of point source confusion on cluster detection in Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) surveys. A filter matched to the spatial and spectral characteristics of the SZ signal optimally extracts clusters from the astrophysical…
Recent Chandra observations have revealed a large population of faint X-ray point sources in the Galactic Centre. The observed population consists of about 2000 faint sources in the luminosity range ~10^31-10^33 erg/s. The majority of these…
The inferred black hole in the Galactic center spans the largest angle on the sky among all known black holes. Forthcoming observational programs plan to localize or potentially resolve the image of Sgr A* to an exquisite precision,…
We simulate the astrometric observations of stars moving close to the black hole in the Galactic Center. We show, that for orbits =<1000 AU and position measurements with the accuracy of the Keck Interferometer, the periastron motion of…
Most galaxies host central supermassive black holes. As two galaxies merge, the black holes also merge. The final single black hole may suffer a kick due to asymmetric gravitational radiation and may not be at the centre of the galaxy;…
Photometric light curves suffer from fundamental degeneracies that limit surface information recovery. We demonstrate that astrometry enables access to complementary information through photocentre variations induced by rotating surface…
ABBREVIATED ABSTRACT: This paper summarises an investigation of the effects of weak friction and noise in time-independent, nonintegrable potentials which admit both regular and stochastic orbits. The aim is to understand the qualitative…
There are at least four unexplained anomalies connected with astrometric data. Perhaps the most disturbing is the fact that when a spacecraft on a flyby trajectory approaches the Earth within 2000 km or less, it often experiences a change…