Related papers: A likelihood function for the Gaia Data
The second Gaia data release (DR2), contains very precise astrometric and photometric properties for more than one billion sources, astrophysical parameters for dozens of millions, radial velocities for millions, variability information for…
The completeness of the Gaia catalogues heavily depends on the status of that space telescope through time. Stars are only published with each of the astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data products if they are detected a minimum…
Before the publication of the Gaia Catalogue, the contents of the first data release have undergone multiple dedicated validation tests. These tests aim at analysing in-depth the Catalogue content to detect anomalies, individual problems in…
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…
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…
We construct from Gaia eDR3 an extensive catalog of spatially resolved binary stars within $\approx$ 1 kpc of the Sun, with projected separations ranging from a few au to 1 pc. We estimate the probability that each pair is a chance…
We present and implement a probabilistic (Bayesian) method for producing catalogs from images of stellar fields. The method is capable of inferring the number of sources N in the image and can also handle the challenges introduced by noise,…
The Gaia satellite, to be launched in 2012, will offer an unprecedented survey of the whole sky down to magnitude 20. The multi-epoch nature of the mission provides a unique opportunity to study variable sources with their astrometric,…
The Gaia early Data Release 3 has delivered exquisite astrometric data for 1.47 billion sources, which is revolutionizing many fields in astronomy. For a small fraction of these sources, the astrometric solutions are poor, and the reported…
Statistical studies of astronomical data sets, in particular of cataloged properties for discrete objects, are central to astrophysics. One cannot model those objects' population properties or incidences without a quantitative understanding…
We demonstrate that the Bayesian evidence can be used to find a good approximation of the ground truth likelihood function of a dataset, a goal of the likelihood-free inference (LFI) paradigm. As a concrete example, we use forward modelled…
Gaia parallax measurements for stars with poor astrometric fits -- as evidenced by high renormalized unit weight error (RUWE) -- are often assumed to be unreliable, but the extent and nature of their biases remain poorly quantified. High…
Gaia is undertaking a deep synoptic survey of the Galaxy, but photometry from individual epochs has, as of yet, only been released for a minimal number of sources. We show that it is possible to identify variable stars in Gaia Data Release…
This perspective chapter briefly surveys: (1) past growth in the use of Bayesian methods in astrophysics; (2) current misconceptions about both frequentist and Bayesian statistical inference that hinder wider adoption of Bayesian methods by…
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…
Context. Whenever correlation functions are used for inference about cosmological parameters in the context of a Bayesian analysis, the likelihood function of correlation functions needs to be known. Usually, it is approximated as a…
Aims. We aim at creating a Bayesian model to infer the coefficients of PL or PLZ relations that propagates uncertainties in the observables in a rigorous and well founded way. Methods. We propose a directed acyclic graph to encode the…
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…
Parallaxes measured by the Gaia mission have huge significance for astronomy, but parallaxes in Gaia DR2 are known to have systematic errors that depend on the source position and other quantities. We use the abundant information in faint…
The GAIA mission will produce an extraordinary database from which we should be able to deduce not only the Galaxy's current structure, but also much of its history, and thus cast a powerful light on the way in which galaxies in general are…