Related papers: Isochrone fitting in the Gaia era
The Gaia mission is expected to provide highly accurate astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic measurements for about $10^9$ objects. Automated classification of detected sources is a key part of the data processing. Here a few aspects…
We have constructed a new set of isochrones, called the Y^2 Isochrones, that represent an update of the Revised Yale Isochrones (RYI), using improved opacities and equations of state. Helium diffusion and convective core overshoot have also…
Context: Stellar clusters are benchmarks for theories of star formation and evolution. The high precision parallax data of the Gaia mission allows significant improvements in the distance determination to stellar clusters and its stars. In…
Ages, chemical compositions, velocity vectors, and Galactic orbits for stars in the solar neighbourhood are fundamental test data for models of Galactic evolution. We aim to improve the accuracy of the Geneva-Copenhagen Survey data by…
Gaia DR3 provides radial velocities for 33 million stars and spectroscopically derived atmospheric parameters for more than five million targets. When combined with the astrometric data, these allow us to derive orbital and stellar…
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…
Context: Star clusters, composed of stars born from the same molecular cloud, serve as invaluable natural laboratories for understanding the fundamental processes governing stellar formation and evolution. Aims: This study aims to…
Age is the most difficult fundamental stellar parameter to infer for isolated stars. While isochrone-based ages are in general imprecise for both main sequence dwarfs and red giants, precise isochrone-based ages can be obtained for stars on…
We present new isochrone fits to colour-magnitude diagrams of the Galactic globular cluster NGC\,6205 (M13). We utilise 34 photometric bands from the ultraviolet to mid-infrared by use of data from the {\it HST}, {\it Gaia} DR2, SDSS,…
We consider the procedure of isochrone fitting and its application to the study of red giant branch (RGB) photometry in old stellar populations. This is extended to consider the problems introduced by the inclusion of lower-magnitude…
Astrometric surveys such as Gaia and LSST will measure parallaxes for hundreds of millions of stars. Yet they will not measure a single distance. Rather, a distance must be estimated from a parallax. In this didactic article, I show that…
Open clusters have long been used to gain insights into the structure, composition, and evolution of the Galaxy. With the large amount of stellar data available for many clusters in the Gaia era, new techniques must be developed for…
Estimating a distance by inverting a parallax is only valid in the absence of noise. As most stars in the Gaia catalogue will have non-negligible fractional parallax errors, we must treat distance estimation as a constrained inference…
White dwarfs (WDs) offer unrealized potential in solving two problems in astrophysics: stellar age accuracy and precision. WD cooling ages can be inferred from surface temperatures and radii, which can be constrained with precision by high…
The availability of asteroseismic constraints for tens of thousands of red giant (RG) stars has opened the door to robust age estimates, enabling time-resolved studies of different populations of stars in the Milky Way. This study leverages…
The Kepler mission has been fantastic for asteroseismology of solar-type stars, but the targets are typically quite distant. As a consequence, the reliability of asteroseismic modeling has been limited by the precision of additional…
We apply the statistical methods by Schoenrich, Binney & Asplund to assess the quality of distances and kinematics in the RAVE-TGAS and LAMOST-TGAS samples of Solar neighbourhood stars. These methods yield a nominal distance accuracy of…
The pixel-to-pixel spectral fitting technique is often used in studies of stellar populations. It enables the user to infer several parameters from integrated light spectra such as ages and chemical abundances. In this paper, we examine the…
ESA recently called for new "Science Ideas" to be investigated in terms of feasibility and technological developments -- for technologies not yet sufficiently mature. These ideas may in the future become candidates for M or L class missions…
The Gaia satellite will survey the entire celestial sphere down to 20th magnitude, obtaining astrometry, photometry, and low resolution spectrophotometry on one billion astronomical sources, plus radial velocities for over one hundred…