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Gaia is a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) selected in 2000, with a target launch date of 2011. The Gaia mission will perform a survey of about 1 billion sources brighter than V=20. Its goal is to provide astrometry…
The Kepler space mission, successfully launched in March 2009, is providing continuous, high-precision photometry of thousands of stars simultaneously. The uninterrupted time-series of stars of all known pulsation types are a precious…
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…
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,…
Near-future data from ESA's Gaia mission will provide precise, full phase-space information for hundreds of millions of stars out to heliocentric distances of ~10 kpc. This "horizon" for full phase-space measurements is imposed by the Gaia…
Helioseismology and solar modelling have enjoyed a golden era thanks to decades-long surveys from ground-based networks such as for example GONG, BiSON, IRIS and the SOHO and SDO space missions which have provided high-quality helioseismic…
The era of high-precision astrometry has dawned upon us. The potential of Gaia $\mu$as-level precision in positional measurements is about to be unleashed in the field of extrasolar planetary systems. The Gaia data hold the promise for much…
Distances from the Gaia mission will no doubt improve our understanding of stellar physics by providing an excellent constraint on the luminosity of the star. However, it is also clear that high precision stellar properties from, for…
Gaia is an ambitious ESA space mission which will provide photometric and astrometric measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a kinematic census of almost one billion stars in our Galaxy. These data will revolutionize our…
With sub-microarcsecond angular accuracy, the \theia telescope will be capable of revealing the architectures of nearby exoplanetary systems down to the mass of Earth. This research addresses the challenges inherent in space astrometry…
The ESA Gaia mission, to be launched during 2013, will observe billions of objects, among which many galaxies, during its scanning of the sky. This will provide a large space-based dataset with unprecedented spatial resolution. Because of…
Stellar halos around galaxies retain fundamental evidence of the processes which lead to their build up. Sophisticated models of galaxy formation in a cosmological context yield quantitative predictions about various observable…
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…
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…
Large-scale photometric surveys are revolutionizing astronomy by delivering unprecedented amounts of data. The rich data sets from missions such as the NASA Kepler and TESS satellites, and the upcoming ESA PLATO mission, are a treasure…
Gaia will observe more than one billion objects brighter than V=20, including stars, asteroids, galaxies and quasars. As Gaia performs real time detection (i.e. without an input catalogue) the intrinsic properties of most of these objects…
We are reaching relative maturity and standardization in one-dimensional single-star stellar evolution and pulsation modeling, and are making advances in binary and 2D and 3D models. However, many physical inputs are still uncertain or…
Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in spring 2013. There are many scientific outcomes from this mission and as far as our Solar System is concerned, the satellite will be able to map thousands of main belt asteroids (MBAs)…
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…
Nearly continuous, densely sampled, space-based photometry allows us to recover the finest details in the light variations of stars. The number of such light curves have been increasing rapidly in the last few years thanks to the extended…