Related papers: Astrometric Interferometry
Asteroseismology provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Recent developments, including the first systematic studies of solar-like pulsators, have boosted the impact of this…
NASA's Kepler mission will fly a photometer based on a wide-field Schmidt camera with a 0.95 m aperture, staring at a single field continuously for at least 4 years. Although the mission's principal aim is to locate transiting extrasolar…
Background. Relative astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with a 1m class space telescope has been repeatedly proposed as a tool for exo-planet detection and characterization, as well as for several topics at the forefront of…
Direct determination of fundamental stellar parameters has many profound and wide-ranging impacts throughout astrophysics. These determinations are rooted in high angular resolution observations. In particular, as long-baseline optical…
We show that an interferometer moving at a relativistic speed relative to a point source of light offers a sensitive probe of acceleration. Such an accelerometer contains no moving parts, and is thus more robust than conventional…
Astrometry -- the precise measurement of positions and motions of celestial objects -- has emerged as a promising avenue for characterizing the dark matter population in our Galaxy. By leveraging recent advances in simulation-based…
Astrometric detection and mass determination of Earth-mass exoplanets requires sub-microarcsec accuracy, which is theoretically possible with an imaging space telescope using field stars as an astrometric reference. The measurement must…
The number of publications of aperture-synthesis images based on optical long-baseline interferometry measurements has recently increased due to easier access to visible and infrared interferometers. The interferometry technique has now…
In this whitepaper, we outline how recent technological advances and ongoing developments open qualitatively new science opportunities in cosmology, fundamental physics, and quantum astrophysics. First, intensity interferometry can…
Stars are not smooth. Their photosphere is covered by a granulation pattern associated with the heat transport by convection. The convection-related surface structures have different size, depth, and temporal variations with respect to the…
The low infrared background and high atmospheric transparency are the principal advantages of Antarctic Plateau sites for astronomy. However, the poor seeing (between one and three arcseconds) negates much of the sensitivity improvements…
Polarimetry remains a largely unexploited technique in observational X-ray astronomy which could provide insight in the study of the strong gravity and magnetic fields at the core of the Constellation-X observational program. Adding a…
Astrometric microlensing will offer in the next future a new channel for investigating the nature of both lenses and sources involved in a gravitational microlensing event. The effect, corresponding to the shift of the position of the…
High-accuracy astrometry permits the determination of not only stellar tangential motion, but also the component along the line-of-sight. Such non-spectroscopic (i.e. astrometric) radial velocities are independent of stellar atmospheric…
Much of the progress in Astronomy has been driven by instrumental developments, from the first telescopes to fiber fed spectrographs. In this review we describe the field of astrophotonics, a combination of photonics and astronomical…
Optical interferometers may not require a phase-stable optical link between the stations if instead sources of quantum-mechanically entangled pairs could be provided to them, enabling long baselines. We developed a new variation of this…
Astrophotonics is a burgeoning field that lies at the interface of photonics and modern astronomical instrumentation. Here we provide a pedagogical review of basic photonic functions that enable modern instruments, and give an overview of…
How important is an independent diameter measurement for the determination of stellar parameters of solar-type stars? When coupled with seismic observables, how well can we determine the stellar mass? If we can determine the radius of the…
Over the past ten years, the concept of adaptive optics has evolved from early experimental stages to a standard observing tool now available at almost all major optical and near-infrared telescope facilities. Adaptive optics will also be…
Asteroseismology is the determination of the interior structures of stars by using their oscillations as seismic waves. Simple explanations of the astrophysical background and some basic theoretical considerations needed in this rapidly…