Related papers: Gaia, Fundamental Physics, and Dark Matter
Gaia is ESA's ambitious space astrometry mission the main objective of which is to astrometrically and spectro-photometrically map 1000 Million celestial objects (mostly in our galaxy) with unprecedented accuracy. The announcement of…
The European Gaia astrometry mission is due for launch in 2011. Gaia will rely on the proven principles of ESA's Hipparcos mission to create an all-sky survey of about one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond, by observing all…
The Gaia satellite, to be launched in 2012, will offer an unprecedented survey of the whole sky down to magnitude 20. The multi-epoch nature of the mission provides a unique opportunity to study variable sources with their astrometric,…
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…
Gaia will provide parallaxes and proper motions with accuracy ranging from 10 to 1000 microarcsecond on up to one billion stars. Most of these will be disk stars: for an unreddened K giant at 6 kpc, it will measure the distance accurate to…
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 search for extrasolar planets has developed rapidly and, today, more than 1700 planets have been found orbiting stars. Thanks to Gaia, we will collect high-accuracy astrometric orbits of thousands of new low-mass celestial objects, such…
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…
The Gaia astrometric mission - the Hipparcos successor - is described in some detail, with its three instruments: the two (spectro)photometers (BP and RP) covering the range 330-1050 nm, the white light (G-band) imager dedicated to…
The growing trove of precision astrometric observations from the Gaia space telescope and other surveys is revealing the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way in ever more exquisite detail. We summarize the current status of our…
In astrometric binaries, the presence of a dark, unseen star can be inferred from the gravitational pull it induces on its luminous binary companion. While the orbit of such binaries can be characterized with precise astrometric…
GAIA will provide a multi-colour photometric and astrometric census of some one billion compact sources, complete to 20th magnitude. In addition, spectra for radial velocities will be obtained for about 30 million stars brighter than V=17.…
Dark matter is one of the pillars of the current standard model of structure formation: it is assumed to constitute most of the matter in the Universe. However, it can so far only be probed indirectly through its gravitational effects, and…
The Gaia mission, with its unprecedented astrometric and photometric precision, combined with its Radial Velocity Spectrometer, will provide to the astronomical community a wealth of necessary constraints to disentangle between the…
The European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope, launched in 2013, aims to measure the positions, parallaxes, and proper motions of a billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. In doing so it will include hundreds of…
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 Gaia data will help to improve the construction of a luminosity function for the disk and the halo and will provide a more accurate determination of the age of our solar neighborhood. Moreover, reliable stellar dynamical investigations…
For nearly a century, more mass has been measured in galaxies than is contained in the luminous stars and gas. Through continual advances in observations and theory, it has become clear that the dark matter in galaxies is not comprised of…
Galaxy models are fundamental to exploiting surveys of our Galaxy. There is now a significant body of work on axisymmetric models. A model can be defined by giving the DF of each major class of stars and of dark matter. Then the…
Can we learn about New Physics with astronomical and astro-particle data? Understanding how this is possible is key to unraveling one of the most pressing mysteries at the interface of cosmology and particle physics: the fundamental nature…