Related papers: Galactic astronomy and small telescopes
Major advancements in space science and detector technology brought about a revolution in global astrometry, the science of measuring distances and motions of stars in the Milky Way and in the local universe. From the first ESA astrometric…
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…
The nearest stars provide a fundamental constraint for our understanding of stellar physics and the Galaxy. The nearby sample serves as an anchor where all objects can be studied and understood with precise data. This work is an update of…
GAIA (originally the acronym for Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics) is a mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) which will make the largest, most precise three dimensional map of our Galaxy by an unparalleled survey of…
The hierarchical model of galaxy formation predicts that the Milky Way halo is populated by tidal debris of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Due to long dynamical times, debris from the lowest mass objects remains coherent as thin and…
The Gaia-ESO Survey is a public spectroscopic survey that has targeted $\gtrsim10^5$ stars covering all major components of the Milky Way from the end of 2011 to 2018, delivering its public final release in May 2022. Unlike other…
The wealth of information in the Gaia catalogue of exoplanets will constitute a fundamental contribution to several hot topics of the astrophysics of planetary systems. I briefly review the potential impact of Gaia micro-arsec astrometry in…
ESA's Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics (GAIA) holds the promise of mapping out the detailed phase space structure of the Galactic halo by providing unprecedented annual proper motion and parallax of $1-10\muas$ astrometric…
Selected results obtained in major observational sky surveys (DSS, 2MASS, 2dF, SDSS) and deep field observations (HDF, GOODS, HUDF, etc.) are reviewed. Modern surveys provide information on the characteristics and space distribution of…
Gaia will be ESA's milestone astrometric mission, and is due for launch at the end of 2013. Gaia will repeatedly map the whole sky measuring about one billion sources to V=20-22 mag. Its data products will be {\mu}as accuracy astrometry,…
With the large amounts of spectroscopic data available today and the very large surveys to come (e.g. Gaia), the need for automatic data analysis software is unquestionable. We thus developed an automatic spectra analysis program for the…
We describe the preliminary results of a ground-based observing campaign aimed at building a grid of approximately 200 spectro-photometric standard stars (SPSS), with an internal $\simeq 1$\% accuracy (and sub-percent precision), tied to…
We present the results of realistic end-to-end simulations of observations of nearby stars with the proposed global astrometry mission GAIA, recently recommended within the context of ESA's Horizon 2000 Plus long-term scientific program. We…
The advent of deep, wide, accurate, digital photometric surveys exemplified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has had a profound impact on studies of the Milky Way. In the past decade, we have transitioned from a scarcity to an…
Using the VLBA, the BeSSeL survey has provided distances and proper motions of young massive stars, allowing an accurate measure of the Galactic spiral structure. By the same technique, we are planning to map the inner Galaxy using…
Gaia Early Data Release 3 contains astrometry and photometry results for about 1.8 billion sources based on observations collected by the ESA Gaia satellite during the first 34 months of operations. This paper focuses on the photometric…
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…
How to analyse Terabytes of photometric data, and extract knowledge on variable stars? How to detect variable phenomena? How to combine different photometric bands? Which algorithm to search for periods? How to characterize and classify the…
Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) provides a wealth of new data products for the astronomical community to exploit, including astrophysical parameters for a half billion stars. In this work we demonstrate the high quality of these data products and…
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…