Related papers: The GRAVITY fringe tracker
The production site and process responsible for the highly variable high-energy emission observed from blazar jets are still debated. Gravitational lenses can be used as microscopes to investigate the nature of such sources. We study the…
The measurement of the gravitational lens delay time between light paths has relied, to date, on the source having sufficient variability to allow photometric variations from each path to be compared. However, the delay times of many…
We present in this paper the design and characterisation of a new sub-system of the VLTI 2nd generation instrument GRAVITY: the Calibration Unit. The Calibration Unit provides all functions to test and calibrate the beam combiner…
Atom interferometers offer excellent sensitivity to gravitational and inertial signals but have limited dynamic range. We introduce a scheme that improves on this trade-off by a factor of 50 using composite fringes, obtained from sets of…
Extending geodetic and astrometric Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations from traditional centimeter wavebands to millimeter wavebands offers numerous scientific potentials and benefits. However, it was considered quite…
We present a new technique based on fixed-delay interferometry for high throughput, high precision and multi-object Doppler radial velocity (RV) surveys for extra-solar planets. The Doppler measurements are conducted through monitoring the…
In the summer of 2011, the first on-sky astrometric commissioning of PRIMA-Astrometry delivered a performance of 3 m'' for a 10 '' separation on bright objects, orders of magnitude away from its exoplanet requirement of 50 {\mu}'' ~ 20…
We develop a high-precision model for laser ranging interferometric (LRI) observables of the GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission. For this, we study the propagation of an electromagnetic wave in the gravitational field in the vicinity of an…
In this paper (Paper II) we complete our discussion on the results of a comprehensive GEANT simulation of the scientific performance of the AGILE Gamma-Ray Imaging Detector (GRID), operating in the 30 MeV - 50 GeV energy range in an…
The very large telescope (VLT) interferometer (VLTI) in its current operating state is equipped with high-order adaptive optics (MACAO) working in the visible spectrum. A low-order near-infrared wavefront sensor (IRIS) is available to…
The Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) combines high contrast imaging with high resolution spectroscopy (R~35,000 in K band) to study directly imaged exoplanets and brown dwarfs in unprecedented detail. KPIC aims to spectrally…
We present the Wavefront Sensor units of the Gravity Plus Adaptive Optics (GPAO) system, which will equip all 8m class telescopes of the VLTI and is an instrumental part of the GRAVITY+ project. It includes two modules for each Wavefront…
Gravitational waves have predominantly been detected using interferometric techniques, with standard approaches limited to 10 kHz and with modern advancements extending this bound to 300 kHz. To explore the largely uncharted…
Infrared observations of Sgr A* probe the region close to the event horizon of the black hole at the Galactic center. These observations can constrain the properties of low-luminosity accretion as well as that of the black hole itself. The…
We report the results of deep optical follow-up surveys of the first two gravitational-wave sources, GW150914 and GW151226, done by the GRAvitational Wave Inaf TeAm Collaboration (GRAWITA). The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) responded promptly…
The direct detection of gravitational waves by ground-based optical interferometers has opened a new window in astronomy. Nevertheless, as these detectors are a combination of two Michelson-Morley like baselines, their sensitivity for…
The determination of horizontal velocity fields at the solar surface is crucial to understanding the dynamics and magnetism of the convection zone of the sun. These measurements can be done by tracking granules. Tracking granules from…
GRAVITY+ improves by orders of magnitude the sensitivity, sky-coverage and contrast of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). A central part of this project is the development of Gravity Plus Adaptive Optics (GPAO), a dedicated…
The Hubble constant value is currently known to 10% accuracy unless assumptions are made for the cosmology (Sandage et al. 2006). Gravitational lens systems provide another probe of the Hubble constant using time delay measurements.…
We propose to use a high throughput and high precision multi-object dispersed fixed-delay interferometer for all sky Doppler surveys for extrasolar planets. This instrument, a combination of a fixed-delay interferometer with a moderate…