Related papers: Gaia, Fundamental Physics, and Dark Matter
Scope of this contribution is twofold. First, it describes the potential of the global astrometry mission Gaia for detecting and measuring planetary systems based on detailed double-blind mode simulations and on the most recent predictions…
As the most ancient branch of astronomy, astrometry has been developed for thousands of years. However, it has only recently become possible to utilize astrometry for the detection of exoplanets. Gaia, an astrometric surveyor of 1 billion…
The Gaia satellite will survey the entire celestial sphere down to 20th magnitude, obtaining astrometry, photometry, and low resolution spectrophotometry on one billion astronomical sources, plus radial velocities for over one hundred…
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…
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…
Distant objects in the solar system are crucial to better understand the history and evolution of its outskirts. The stellar occultation technique allows the determination of their sizes and shapes with kilometric accuracy, a detailed…
At the heart of a successful theory of galaxy formation must be a detailed physical understanding of the dissipational processes which form spiral galaxies. To what extent can we unravel the events that produced the Galaxy as we see it…
Gaia is an ambitious space astrometry mission of ESA with a main objective to map the sky in astrometry and photometry down to a magnitude 20 by the end of the next decade. While the mission is built and operated by ESA and an industrial…
The GAIA astrometric mission has recently been approved as one of the next two `cornerstones' of ESA's science programme, with a launch date target of not later than mid-2012. GAIA will provide positional and radial velocity measurements…
Gaia is the next astrometry mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), following up on the success of the Hipparcos mission. With a focal plane containing 106 CCD detectors, Gaia will survey the entire sky and repeatedly observe the…
Gaia is a very ambitious mission of the European Space Agency. At the heart of Gaia lie the measurements of the positions, distances, space motions, brightnesses and astrophysical parameters of stars, which represent fundamental pillars of…
The gravitational pull of an unseen companion to a luminous star is well-known to cause deviations to the parallax and proper motion of a star. In a previous paper in this series, we argue that the astrometric mission Gaia can identify…
Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in 2013 and set on L2 point of Lagrange. It will observe a large number of Solar System Objets (SSO) down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousand of Main Belt…
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…
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…
Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) astrometry space mission, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. Gaia's main goal is to collect high-precision astrometric data (i.e. positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) for the brightest…
Studying our Galaxy, the Milky Way (MW), gives us a close-up view of the interplay between cosmology, dark matter, and galaxy formation. In the next decade our understanding of the MW's dynamics, stellar populations, and structure will…
The Gaia mission is reviewed together with the expected contents of the final catalogue. It is then argued that the ultimate goal of Galactic structure studies with Gaia astrometry should be to build a dynamical model of our galaxy which is…
Dark matter comprises the bulk of the matter in the universe but its particle nature and cosmological origin remain mysterious. Knowledge of the dark matter density distribution in the Milky Way Galaxy is crucial to both our understanding…
We demonstrate that Gaia's detection of stars on wide orbits around black holes opens a new observational window on dark matter structures -- such as scalar clouds and dark matter spikes -- predicted in a range of theoretical scenarios.…