Related papers: Unrecognized Astrometric Confusion in the Galactic…
The origin of irradiation and fluorescence of the 6.4 keV bright giant molecular clouds surrounding Sgr A*, the central supermassive black hole of our Galaxy, remains enigmatic. Testing the theory of a past active period of Sgr A* requires…
The origin of the high-energy gamma-ray emission from the Milky Way center is still unclear and debated because of the impact of systematics afflicting the measurements from current experiments. Several theories and phenomenological models…
The Galactic center (GC) is a dense and chaotic region filled with unusual sources, such as intense star forming regions, dense star clusters, nonthermal radio filaments, and a massive black hole. The proximity of the GC region makes it an…
Astrometric and spectroscopic monitoring of individual stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center offer a promising way to detect general relativistic effects. While low-order effects are expected to be detected…
We present new proper motion measurements and simultaneous orbital solutions for three newly identified (S0-16, S0-19, and S0-20) and four previously known (S0-1, S0-2, S0-4, and S0-5) stars at the Galactic Center. This analysis pinpoints…
In the past decade high resolution measurements in the infrared employing adaptive optics imaging on 10m telescopes have allowed determining the three dimensional orbits stars within ten light hours of the compact radio source at the center…
Astrometry covers a parameter space that cannot be reached by RV or transit methods to detect terrestrial planets on wide orbits. In addition, high accuracy astrometric measurements are necessary to measure the inclination of the planet's…
We consider the problem of determining the Galaxy's gravitational potential from a star catalogue. We show that orbit-based approaches to this problem suffer from unacceptable numerical noise deriving from the use of only a finite number of…
The center of the Milky Way hosts a massive black hole. The observational evidence for its existence is overwhelming. The compact radio source Sgr A* has been associated with a black hole since its discovery. In the last decade,…
A fundamental process in astrophysics is the matching of two photometric catalogues. It is crucial that the correct objects be paired, and that their photometry does not suffer from any spurious additional flux. We compare the positions of…
In-spiraling supermassive black holes should emit gravitational waves, which would produce characteristic distortions in the time of arrival residuals from millisecond pulsars. Multiple national and regional consortia have constructed…
This paper deals with the detection problem of extragalactic point-sources in multi-frequency, microwave sky maps that will be obtainable in future cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) experiments with instruments capable of very…
Accreting binaries containing a black hole are stellar systems composed of a normal star and a black hole. Because of the strong gravitational pull of the black hole, matter is removed from the companion star and falls into the compact ob…
The S-stars discovered in the Galactic center (GC) are expected to provide unique dynamical tests of the Kerr metric of the massive black hole (MBH) orbited by them. In order to obtain unbiased measurements of its spin and the related…
Taking into account noise from intrinsic ellipticities of source galaxies, in this paper, we study the peak statistics in weak-lensing convergence maps around clusters of galaxies and beyond. We emphasize how the noise peak statistics is…
Gamma ray observations have found evidence of an extremely energetic outflow emanating from the Galactic Centre, and an `excess' of emission at GeV energies towards the Galactic Centre over that expected from current models. Determining…
Spatial Fluctuations in the Cosmic Infrared Background have now been measured out to sub-degree scales showing a strong clustering signal from unresolved sources. We attempt to explain these measurement by considering faint galaxy…
Due to dramatic improvements in the precision of astrometric measurements, the observation of light centroid shifts in observed stars due to intervening massive compact objects (`astrometric microlensing') will become possible in the near…
In gravitational microlensing, binary systems may act as lenses or sources. Identifying lens binarity is generally easy especially in events characterized by caustic crossing since the resulting light curve exhibits strong deviations from…
The parameter-free reconstruction of the surface-mass density of clusters of galaxies is one of the principal applications of weak gravitational lensing. From the observable ellipticities of images of background galaxies, the tidal…