Related papers: Astronomical distance scales in the Gaia era

The measurement of the positions, distances, motions and luminosities of stars represents the foundations of modern astronomical knowledge. Launched at the end of the eighties, the ESA Hipparcos satellite was the first space mission…

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,…

Hipparcos, the first ever experiment of global astrometry, was launched by ESA in 1989 and its results published in 1997 (Perryman et al., Astron. Astrophys. 323, L49, 1997; Perryman & ESA (eds), The Hipparcos and Tycho catalogues, ESA…

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 formal division of the distance indicators into primary and secondary leads to difficulties in description of methods which can actually be used in two ways: with, and without the support of the other methods for scaling. Thus instead…

Gaia is a satellite mission of the European Space Agency which is creating a catalogue of extremely accurate positions, distances and space motions of two billion stars in our Galaxy, along with more than one hundred thousand solar system…

Gaia is an all sky, high precision astrometric and photometric satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) due for launch in 2010-2011. Its primary mission is to study the composition, formation and evolution of our Galaxy. Gaia will…

The Hipparcos satellite was launched in 1989. It was the first, and remains to date the only, attempt at performing large-scale astrometric measurements from space. Hipparcos marked a fundamentally new approach to the field of astrometry,…

Asteroseismology provides fundamental properties (mass, radius and effective temperature) of solar-like oscillating stars using so-called scaling relations. These properties allow the computation of the asteroseismic distance of stars. We…

The satellite missions Hipparcos and Gaia by the European Space Agency will together bring a decrease of astrometric errors by a factor 10000, four orders of magnitude, more than was achieved during the preceding 500 years. This modern…

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…

The Gaia space astrometry mission is measuring accurate distances and space motions of more than two billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. This is a first look at how Gaia is contributing to fundamental physics, and in particular…

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…

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…

Access to microarcsecond astrometry is now routine in the radio, infrared, and optical domains. In particular the publication of the second data release from the Gaia mission made it possible for every astronomer to work with easily…

In its all-sky survey, the ESA global astrometry mission Gaia will perform high-precision astrometry and photometry for 1 billion stars down to $V = 20$ mag. The data collected in the Gaia catalogue, to be published by the end of the next…

The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years…

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…

Accurate astronomical distance determination is crucial for all fields in astrophysics, from Galactic to cosmological scales. Despite, or perhaps because of, significant efforts to determine accurate distances, using a wide range of…

Astrometry from space has unique advantages over ground-based observations: the all-sky coverage, relatively stable, and temperature and gravity invariant operating environment delivers precision, accuracy and sample volume several orders…