Related papers: Improving Distances to Binary Millisecond Pulsars …
The combination of visual and spectroscopic orbits in binary systems enables precise distance measurements without additional assumptions, making them ideal for examining the parallax zero-point offset (PZPO) at bright magnitudes (G < 13)…
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…
We aim to measure very precise and accurate model-independent masses and distances of detached binary stars. Precise masses at the $< 1$% level are necessary to test and calibrate stellar interior and evolution models, while precise and…
Gaia parallax measurements for stars with poor astrometric fits -- as evidenced by high renormalized unit weight error (RUWE) -- are often assumed to be unreliable, but the extent and nature of their biases remain poorly quantified. High…
While the majority of massive stars have a stellar companion, most pulsars appear to be isolated. Taken at face value, this suggests that most massive binaries break apart due to strong natal kicks received in supernova explosions. However,…
Accurate distances to pulsars can be used for a variety of studies of the Galaxy and its electron content. However, most distance measures to pulsars have been derived from the absorption (or lack thereof) of pulsar emission by Galactic HI…
Astrometric missions like Gaia provide exceptionally precise measurements of stellar positions and proper motions. Gravitational waves traveling between the observer and distant stars can induce small, correlated shifts in these apparent…
Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) experiments exploit the clock-like behaviour of an array of millisecond pulsars, with the goal of detecting low-frequency gravitational waves. PTA experiments have been in operation over the last decade, led by…
Context: Accurate distance measurements are fundamental to the study of Planetary Nebulae (PNe) but have long been elusive. The most accurate and model-independent distance measurements for galactic PNe come from the trigonometric…
Previous analyses of various standard candles observed by the Gaia satellite have reported statistically significant systematics in the parallaxes that have improved from $\sim$250 $\mu$as in the first data release (DR1) to 50--80 $\mu$as…
Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are being used to search for very low frequency gravitational waves. A gravitational wave signal appears in pulsar timing residuals through two components: one independent of and one dependent on the pulsar's…
The present work aims to build a new statistical distance scale for planetary nebulae (PNe) based on a rigorous calibration sample. The distances of the calibration sample are derived from the trigonometric parallax method using the recent…
Astrometric surveys such as Gaia and LSST will measure parallaxes for hundreds of millions of stars. Yet they will not measure a single distance. Rather, a distance must be estimated from a parallax. In this didactic article, I show that…
Estimating a distance by inverting a parallax is only valid in the absence of noise. As most stars in the Gaia catalogue will have non-negligible fractional parallax errors, we must treat distance estimation as a constrained inference…
In this paper, we study compact binary millisecond pulsars with low- and very low-mass companion stars (spiders) in the Galactic field, using data from the latest Gaia data release (DR3). We infer the parallax distances of the optical…
The Early Gaia Data Release 3 (EDR3) provides precise astrometry for nearly 1.5 billion sources across the entire sky. A few tens of these are associated with neutron stars in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. Here, we report on a search…
Since its launch in 2013, the Gaia space telescope has provided precise measurements of the positions and magnitudes of over 1 billion stars. This has enabled extensive searches for stellar and sub-stellar companions through astrometric and…
CONTEXT. Gaia EDR3 has produced parallaxes for 1.468x10^9 sources but there are calibration issues that require corrections to the published values and uncertainties. AIMS. We want to characterize the behavior of the uncertainties of the…
Recent results have suggested that there is tension between the Gaia DR1 TGAS distances and the distances obtained using luminosities determined by eclipsing binaries or asteroseismology on red giant stars. We use the $K_s$-band…
A well constrained estimate of the distance remains one of the main factors to properly interpret the observations of accreting X-ray pulsars. Since these objects are typically well studied, multiple distance estimates obtained with…