Related papers: Relative astrometry in an annular field
One proposed method for finding terrestrial planets around nearby stars is to use two spacecraft--a telescope and a specially shaped occulter that is specifically designed to prevent all but a tiny fraction of the starlight from diffracting…
Future missions like Roman, HabEx, and LUVOIR will directly image exoplanets in reflected light. While current near infrared direct imaging searches are only sensitive to young, self-luminous planets whose brightness is independent of their…
The Extrasolar Planet Search with PRIMA project (ESPRI) aims at characterising and detecting extrasolar planets by measuring the host star's reflex motion using the narrow-angle astrometry capability of the PRIMA facility at the Very Large…
Distant starlight passing through the Earth's atmosphere is refracted by an angle of just over one degree near the surface. This focuses light onto a focal line starting at an inner (and chromatic) boundary out to infinity - offering an…
Reliable prediction of stellar diameters, particularly angular diameters, is a useful and necessary tool for the increasing number of milliarcsecond resolution studies being carried out in the astronomical community. A new and accurate…
The "Breakthrough Starshot" aims at sending near-speed-of-light cameras to nearby stellar systems in the future. Due to the relativistic effects, a trans-relativistic camera naturally serves as a spectrograph, a lens, and a wide-field…
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…
Astrometric issues for solar system studies are discussed. An overview gives references and cover all aspects of the solar system where astrometry is important: orbits of planets, moons, asteroids and NEOs, masses of asteroids, occultations…
The Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) allows for major brightness amplification ($\sim 10^{11}$ at wavelength of $1~\mu$m) and extreme angular resolution ($\sim10^{-10}$ arcsec) within a narrow field of view. A meter-class telescope, with a…
Grid stars and reference stars provide the fundamental global and local astrometric reference frames for observations by the Space Interferometry Mission. They must therefore be astrometrically stable at the ~1 uas level. I present simple…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is conceived as an 8.4-m telescope with CCD or CMOS focal plane covering most of a field 0.6 m in diameter, the latter exceeding the size of the largest photographic plates ever used in astronomy.…
Reference systems and frames are crucial for high precision absolute astrometric work, and their foundations must be well-defined. The current frame, the International Celestial Reference Frame, will be discussed: its history, the use of…
Ground-based telescopes coupled with adaptive optics (AO) have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the…
It is well known that the solar gravitational field can be considered as a telescope with a prime focus at locations beyond 550 au. In this work we present a new derivation of the wave-optical properties of the system, by adapting the…
During close angular approaches of solar system planets to astrometric radio sources, the apparent positions of these sources shift due to relativistic effects and, thus, these events may be used for testing the theory of general…
Earth-mass exoplanets on year-long orbits and cool gas giants (CGG) on decade-long orbits lie at the edge of current detection limits. The Terra Hunting Experiment (THE) will take nightly radial velocity (RV) observations on HARPS3 of at…
We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…
Over the last 20 years Hubble Space Telescope Fine Guidance Sensor interferometric astrometry has produced precise and accurate parallaxes of astrophysical interesting stars and mass estimates for stellar companions. We review parallax…
Photometry of galaxies has typically focused on small, faint systems due to their interest for cosmological studies. Large angular size galaxies, on the other hand, offer a more detailed view into the properties of galaxies, but bring a…
We present a conceptual design for a space based Galactic Exoplanet Survey Telescope (GEST) which will use the gravitational microlensing technique to detect extra solar planets with masses as low as that of Mars at all separations >~ 1 AU.…