Related papers: On the Accuracy of Three-dimensional Kinematic Dis…
We conducted phase referencing VLBI observations of the Mira variable T~Lepus (T~Lep) using VERA, from 2003 to 2006. The distance to the source was determined from its annual parallax which was measured to be 3.06$\pm$0.04 mas,…
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…
Recent VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometer) observations determined the distances and proper motions of star-forming regions in spiral arms directly. They showed that star-forming regions and young stars have large peculiar motions, as…
Parallax measurements allow distances to celestial objects to be determined. Coupled with measurement of their position on the celestial sphere, it gives a full three-dimensional picture of the location of the objects relative to the…
We present the initial results of multi-epoch VLBI observations of the 22 GHz H2O masers in the Orion KL region with VERA (VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry). With the VERA dual-beam receiving system, we have carried out…
High-accuracy astrometry permits the determination of not only stellar tangential motion, but also the component along the line-of-sight. Such non-spectroscopic (i.e. astrometric) radial velocities are independent of stellar atmospheric…
We use a newly developed observing mode on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), spatial scanning, to increase source sampling a thousand-fold and measure changes in source positions to a precision of 20--40…
The exploration of interstellar space will require autonomous navigation systems that do not rely on tracking from the Earth. Here I develop a method to determine the 3D position and 3D velocity of a spacecraft in deep space using a star…
Errors in the kinematic distances, under the assumption of circular gas orbits, were estimated by performing synthetic observations of a model disk galaxy. It was found that the error is < 0.5 kpc for most of the disk when the measured…
We present analysis of 25 years' worth of archival VLA, VLBA and EVN observations of the X-ray binary Cygnus X-3. From this, we deduce the source proper motion, allowing us to predict the location of the central binary system at any given…
Astrometry can bring powerful constraints to bear on a variety of scientific questions about neutron stars, including their origins, astrophysics, evolution, and environments. Using phase-referenced observations at the VLBA, in conjunction…
We report parallaxes and proper motions of three water maser sources in high-mass star-forming regions in the Outer Spiral Arm of the Milky Way. The observations were conducted with the Very Long Baseline Array as part of Bar and Spiral…
In determining the distances to stars within the Milky Way galaxy, one often uses photometric or spectroscopic parallax. In these methods, the type of each individual star is determined, and the absolute magnitude of that star type is…
Stellar distances constitute a foundational pillar of astrophysics. The publication of 1.47 billion stellar parallaxes from Gaia is a major contribution to this. Yet despite Gaia's precision, the majority of these stars are so distant or…
The growing ``Hubble tension'' has prompted the need for precise measurements of cosmological distances. This paper demonstrates a purely geometric approach for determining the distance to extragalactic binaries through a joint analysis of…
We present a 3D Bayesian method to model the kinematics of strongly lensed galaxies from spatially-resolved emission-line observations. This technique enables us to simultaneously recover the lens-mass distribution and the source kinematics…
In order to understand the nature of the lenses that generate microlensing events, one would like to measure their mass, distance, and velocity. Unfortunately, current microlensing experiments measure only one parameter of the events, the…
The pulsar velocity distribution provides information about the binary history of pulsar progenitors as well as asymmetries of the supernova events in which pulsars are born. Studies of local pulsars present a biased view of this…
We analyse the radial and tangential velocity fields in the Galaxy as seen from the Sun by using as a first approximation a simple axisymmetric model, which we then compare with the corresponding fields in a barred N-body model of the Milky…
We have measured an annual parallax of the Mira variable R~Ursae~Majoris (R~UMa) with the VLBI exploration for Radio Astronomy (VERA). From the monitoring VLBI observations spanning about two years, we detected H$_2$O maser spots in the LSR…