Related papers: Astrometric detection of exoplanets
In no other field of astrophysics has the impact of new instrumentation been as substantial as in the domain of exoplanets. Before 1995 our knowledge about exoplanets was mainly based on philosophical and theoretical considerations. The…
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…
Over the past 4 decades, the exploration of planets beyond our solar system has yielded the discovery of over 5600 exoplanets orbiting different stars. Continuous advancements in instrumentation and cutting-edge techniques empower…
The European Space Agency Gaia satellite, planned for launch in late 2013, will perform systematic astrometric observations of the whole sky over a five year period. During this mission many thousands of Solar System Objects down to…
The Gaia Data Release 1 (GDR1) is a first, important step on the path of evolution of astrometric accuracy towards a much improved situation. Although asteroids are not present in GDR1, this intermediate release already impacts asteroid…
Ultra-cool dwarfs are very low-mass stars or brown dwarfs and because of their faintness they are difficult targets for radial velocity and transit planet searches. High-precision astrometry is one way to efficiently discover planets around…
COROT will be the first high precision photometric satellite to be launched with the aim of detecting exoplanets by the transit method. In this paper, we present the simulations we have carried out in order to assess the detection…
Stellar activity is a potential important limitation to the detection of low mass extrasolar planets with indirect methods (RV, photometry, astrometry). In previous papers, using the Sun as a proxy, we investigated the impact of stellar…
The Gaia mission has observed over 2 billion stars repeatedly across the entire sky over 10 years, revealing the many astronomical objects that vary on human timescales from seconds to years. Its repeated astrometric, photometric,…
The release of Gaia catalog is revolutionary to the astronomy of solar system objects. After some effects such as atmospheric refraction and CCD geometric distortion have been taken into account, the astrometric precision for ground-based…
Gravitational microlensing is a new technique that allows low-mass exoplanets to be detected at large distances of ~7kpc. This paper briefly outlines the principles of the method and describes the observational techniques. It shows that…
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 large astrometric and photometric survey performed by the Gaia mission allows for a panoptic view of the Galactic disc and in its stellar cluster population. Hundreds of clusters were only discovered after the latest G data release…
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.…
Astrometric microlensing is a unique tool to measure stellar masses. It allows us to determine the mass of the lensing star with an accuracy of a few per cent. In this paper, we update, extend, and refine our predictions of…
Astrometric positions of moving objects in the Solar System have been measured using a variety of star catalogs in the past. Previous work has shown that systematic errors in star catalogs can affect the accuracy of astrometric…
Photometric light curves suffer from fundamental degeneracies that limit surface information recovery. We demonstrate that astrometry enables access to complementary information through photocentre variations induced by rotating surface…
Exoplanetary science is among the fastest evolving fields of today's astronomical research. Ground-based planet-hunting surveys alongside dedicated space missions (Kepler, CoRoT) are delivering an ever-increasing number of exoplanets, now…
Gaia Data Release 1 (Gaia DR1) contains astrometric results for more than 1 billion stars brighter than magnitude 20.7 based on observations collected by the Gaia satellite during the first 14 months of its operational phase. We give a…
The Gaia mission is described, along with its scientific potential and its updated science perfomances. Although it is often described as a self-calibrated mission, Gaia still needs to tie part of its measurements to external scales (or to…