Related papers: The First Stellar Parallaxes Revisited
Many features of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) contrive to make it the best telescope for pulsar astrometry. The measured proper motions and parallaxes allow distances and transverse velocities to be determined. These in turn provide…
We present the first proper motion measurements for the galaxy M31. We obtained new V-band imaging data with the HST ACS/WFC and WFC3/UVIS of a spheroid field near the minor axis, an outer disk field along the major axis, and a field on the…
We test asteroseismic radii of Kepler main-sequence and subgiant stars by deriving their parallaxes which are compared with those of the first Gaia data release. We compute radii based on the asteroseismic scaling relations as well as by…
Spectrophotometric distances to stars observed by large spectroscopic surveys offer a crucial complement to parallax distances that remain very important also after the future Gaia data releases. Here we present a probabilistic approach to…
Hill et al. (2022, arXiv:2203.00221) recently published analysis of the intermediate polar DO Dra (YY Dra) using TESS, ASAS-SN and ZTF data. They also attempted a search for the "lost" variable YY Dra using modern catalogs of variable stars…
We compared positions of the Gaia first data release (DR1) secondary data set at its faint limit with CCD positions of stars in 20 fields observed with the VLT/FORS2 camera. The FORS2 position uncertainties are smaller than one…
Converting a noisy parallax measurement into a posterior belief over distance requires inference with a prior. Usually this prior represents beliefs about the stellar density distribution of the Milky Way. However, multi-band photometry…
The great development of astrometric accuracy since the observations by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus about 150 BC has often been displayed in diagrams showing the accuracy versus time. Two new diagrams are provided here, one for…
We present the first data release of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), an ambitious spectroscopic survey to measure radial velocities and stellar atmosphere parameters (temperature, metallicity, surface gravity) of up to one million…
The standard cosmological parallax--distance formula, as found in the literature, including text-books and reference books on cosmology, requires a correction. This correction stems from the fact that in the standard text-book derivation it…
The catalogue by Johannes Hevelius with the positions and magnitudes of 1564 entries was published by his wife Elisabeth Koopman in 1690. We provide a machine-readable version of the catalogue, and briefly discuss its accuracy on the basis…
We have performed high-precision astrometry of H2O maser sources in Galactic star forming region Sharpless 269 (S269) with VERA. We have successfully detected a trigonometric parallax of 189+/-8 micro-arcsec, corresponding to the source…
Historical star magnitudes from catalogues by Ptolemy (137 AD), as-Sufi (964) and Tycho Brahe (1602/27) are converted to the Johnson V-mag scale and compared to modern day values from the HIPPARCOS catalogue. The deviations (or "errors")…
We show that a straightforward application of the predicted relation connecting the absolute K magnitude of fundamental RR Lyrae variables to their period and metal content, together with current evolutionary predictions on the mass and…
Since the discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, astronomers have inferred the orbital properties of planets using stellar radial velocity (RV) measurements. For a star orbited by a single planet, the stellar orbit…
A major problem in the interpretation of microlensing events is that the only measured quantity, the Einstein time scale t_E, is a degenerate combination of the three quantities one would like to know, the mass, distance, and speed of the…
A recent article by Alexopoulos and Leontsinis presented empirical evidence that the first digits of the distances to galaxies are a reasonably good fit to the probabilities predicted by Benford's law, the well known logarithmic statistical…
Individual distances to planetary nebulae are of the utmost relevance for our understanding of post-asymptotic giant-branch evolution because they allow a precise determination of stellar and nebular properties. Also, objects with…
Since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope nine years ago, Cepheid distances to 25 galaxies have been determined for the purpose of calibrating secondary distance indicators. A variety of these can now be calibrated, and the…
Astrometric observations of microlensing events were originally proposed to determine the lens proper motion with which the physical parameters of lenses can be better constrained. In this proceeding, we demonstrate that besides this…