Related papers: Galactic astronomy and small telescopes
The power of micro-arcsecond ($\mu$as) astrometry is about to be unleashed. ESA's Gaia mission, now headed towards the end of the first year of routine science operations, will soon fulfil its promise for revolutionary science in countless…
Astrophysical studies require a knowledge of very accurate positions, motions and distances of stars. A brief overview is given of the significance and development of astrometry by ESA's two astrometric satellites, Hipparcos and Gaia,…
Gaia is a space mission currently measuring the five astrometric parameters as well as spectrophotometry of at least 1 billion stars to G = 20.7 mag with unprecedented precision. The sixth parameter in phase space (radial velocity) is also…
The Gaia mission is designed as a Galaxy explorer, and will measure simultaneously, in a survey mode, the five or six phase space parameters of all stars brighter than 20th magnitude, as well as providing a description of their…
The ESA cornerstone mission Gaia was successfully launched in 2013, and is now scanning the sky to accurately measure the positions and motions of about two billion point-like sources of 3<V<20.5 mag, with the main goal of reconstructing…
The Gaia spacecraft of the European Space Agency (ESA) has been securing observations of solar system objects (SSOs) since the beginning of its operations. Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) contains the observations of a selected sample of 14,099…
Stellar clusters are important for astrophysics in many ways, for instance as optimal tracers of the Galactic populations to which they belong or as one of the best test bench for stellar evolutionary models. Gaia DR1, with TGAS, is just…
Distant objects in the solar system are crucial to better understand the history and evolution of its outskirts. The stellar occultation technique allows the determination of their sizes and shapes with kilometric accuracy, a detailed…
Precise measurement of the fundamental parameters of stellar systems, including mass and radius, depends critically on how well the stellar distances are known. Astrometry from space provides parallax measurements of unprecented accuracy,…
The body of photometric and astrometric data on stars in the Galaxy has been growing very fast in recent years (Hipparcos/Tycho, OGLE-3, 2-Mass, DENIS, UCAC2, SDSS, RAVE, Pan Starrs, Hermes, ...) and in two years ESA will launch the Gaia…
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…
Gaia mission will offer an exceptional opportunity to perform variability studies. The data homogeneity, its optimised photometric systems, composed of 11 medium and 4-5 broad bands, the high photometric precision in G band of one milli-mag…
The ESA Gaia mission uses two telescopes to create the most ambitious survey of the Galaxy. The angle between them must be known with exquisite precision and accuracy. An interferometer: the Basic Angle Monitoring system measures its…
Quasars are often considered to be point-like objects. This is largely true and allows for an excellent alignment of the optical positional reference frame of the ongoing ESA mission Gaia with the International Celestial Reference Frame.…
GAIA astrometric mission of ESA will be very efficient in discovering binary and multiple stars with any orbital period, from minutes to millions of years. Main parameters of the revised mission design are presented. Next we estimate the…
With the publication of Gaia DR2, 1.3 billion stars now have public parallax and proper motion measurements. In this contribution, we compare the results for sources that have both optical and radio measurements, focusing on circumstellar…
Accurate determinations of stellar parameters and distances for large complete samples of stars are keys for conducting detailed studies of the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. Here we present stellar atmospheric parameters ($T_{\rm…
The search for extrasolar planets has developed rapidly and, today, more than 1700 planets have been found orbiting stars. Thanks to Gaia, we will collect high-accuracy astrometric orbits of thousands of new low-mass celestial objects, such…
The sheer size of high-accuracy, multi-band photometry, spectroscopy, astrometry and seismic data that space missions like Kepler, Gaia, PLATO, TESS, JWST and ground-based facilities under development such as MOONS, WEAVE and the LSST will…
The Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey is a large-scale stellar spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way and designed to deliver chemical information complementary to a large number of stars covered by the $Gaia$ mission. We…