Related papers: Exploring the Early Universe with Gaia and THEIA
Third generation ground-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors, such as Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer, will operate in the $(\text{few}-10^4)$ Hz frequency band, with a boost in sensitivity providing an unprecedented reach into…
The Gaia space telescope allows for unprecedented accuracy for astrometric measurements of stars in the Galaxy. In this work, we explore the sensitivity of Gaia to detect primordial black hole (PBH) dark matter through the distortions that…
Quasars are often considered to be point-like objects. This is largely true and allows for an excellent alignment of the optical positional reference frame of the ongoing ESA mission Gaia with the International Celestial Reference Frame.…
The causal tail of stochastic gravitational waves can be used to probe the energy density in free streaming relativistic species as well as measure $g_\star(T)$ and beta functions $\beta(T)$ as a function of temperature. In the event of the…
The Gaia space project, planned for launch in 2011, is one of the ESA cornerstone missions, and will provide astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data of very high quality for about one billion stars brighter than V=20. This will…
LISA is a planned space-based gravitational-wave (GW) detector that would be sensitive to waves from low-frequency sources, in the band of roughly (0.03 - 0.1) mHz < f < 0.1 Hz. This is expected to be an extremely rich chunk of the GW…
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 ESA cornerstone mission Gaia was successfully launched in 2013, and is now scanning the sky to accurately measure the positions and motions of about two billion point-like sources of 3<V<20.5 mag, with the main goal of reconstructing…
Over the course of several years, stars trace helical trajectories as they traverse across the sky due to the combined effects of proper motion and parallax. It is well known that the gravitational pull of an unseen companion can cause…
Gravitational wave experiments will play a key role in the investigation of the frontiers of cosmology and the structure of fundamental fields at high energies, by detecting, or setting strong upper-limits to, the primordial gravitational…
The ESA Gaia satellite scans the whole sky with a temporal sampling ranging from seconds and hours to months. Each time a source passes within the Gaia field of view, it moves over 10 CCDs in 45 s and a lightcurve with 4.5 s sampling (the…
First order phase transitions in the early universe could produce a gravitational-wave background that might be detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Such an observation would provide evidence for physics beyond the…
The notion that microparsec-scale black holes can be used to probe gigaparsec-scale physics may seem counterintuitive, at first. Yet, the gravitational observatory LISA will detect cosmologically-distant coalescing pairs of massive black…
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…
We investigate the capability of the Taiji space-based gravitational wave observatory to detect stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds produced by first-order phase transitions in the early universe. Using a comprehensive simulation…
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…
We show results for the expected reach of the network of experiments that is being set up globally with the aim of detecting the "invisible" axion, in light of a non-standard thermal history of the universe. Assuming that the axion is the…
The GAIA satellite will observe the Galaxy and its closest satellites in great detail. This should allow (i) dating past events of dwarf galaxies merging or interacting with the Galaxy, and much improved orbital parameters of the nine dwarf…
Stellar clusters are important for astrophysics in many ways, for instance as optimal tracers of the Galactic populations to which they belong or as one of the best test bench for stellar evolutionary models. Gaia DR1, with TGAS, is just…
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…