Related papers: The confusion limit on astrometry with SIM
The accuracy of position measurements on stellar targets with the future Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will be limited not only by photon noise and by the properties of the instrument (design, stability, etc.) and the overall…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will observe sources in crowded fields. Recent work has shown that source crowding can induce significant positional errors in SIM's astrometric measurements, even for targets many magnitudes brighter…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is a space-based long-baseline optical interferometer for precision astrometry. One of the primary objectives of the SIM instrument is to accurately determine the directions to a grid of stars,…
This paper analyses the relativistic stellar aberration requirements for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). We address the issue of general relativistic deflection of light by the massive self-gravitating bodies. Specifically, we…
In a previous paper we described a method of estimating the single-measurement bias to be expected in astrometric observations of targets in crowded fields with the future Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). That study was based on a…
We address the issue of relativistic stellar aberration requirements for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). Motivated by the importance of this issue for SIM, we have considered a problem of relative astrometric observations of two…
By combining SIM observations with ground-based photometry, one can completely solve microlensing events seen toward the Galactic bulge. One could measure the mass, distance, and transverse velocity of ~100 lenses to ~5% precision in only…
Astrometric measurements of microlensing events can in principle determine both the "parallax" \tilde r_E and the "proper motion" \mu of an individual event which (combined with the Einstein time scale t_E) in turn yield the mass, distance,…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), with its launch date planned for 2005, has as its goal astrometry with ~ 1 micro-arcsecond accuracy for stars as faint as 20th mag. If the SIM lives to expectations it can be used to measure…
Precision astrometry at microarcsecond accuracy has application to a wide range of astrophysical problems. This paper is a study of the science questions that can be addressed using an instrument that delivers parallaxes at about 4…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is expected to make precise astrometric measurements that can be used to detect low mass planets around nearby stars. Since most nearby stars are members of multiple star systems, many stars will have…
This paper is a continuation of our previous analysis (i.e. Turyshev 2002a, 2002b) of the relativistic stellar aberration requirements for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). Here we have considered a problem of how the expected…
Fluctuations in the brightness of the background radiation can lead to confusion with real point sources. Such background emission confusion will be important for infrared observations with relatively large beam sizes since the amount of…
We report on the expected astrometric performance of the Thirty Meter Telescope's InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer (IRIS) as determined using simulated images of the Galactic center. This region of the Galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole…
Accurate astrometry is a key deliverable for the next generation of multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems. The MCAO Visible Imager and Spectrograph (MAVIS) is being designed for the Very Large Telescope Adaptive Optics Facility and…
Astrometric detection of a stellar wobble on the plane of the sky will provide us a next breakthrough in searching extrasolar planets. The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is expected to achieve a high-precision astrometry as accurate as…
The Galactic Centre is a highly crowded stellar field and frequent unrecognized events of source confusion, which involve undetected faint stars, are expected to introduce astrometric noise on a sub-mas level. This confusion noise is the…
In very crowded fields, the modulation of the background by the sea of unresolved faint sources induces centroid shifts. The errors increase with the number of sources per beam. Even the most optimistic simulations of imaging data show that…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is the instrument of choice when it comes to observing astrometric microlensing events where nearby, usually high-proper-motion stars (``lenses''), pass in front of more distant stars (``sources'').…
We have obtained HST-NICMOS observations of five of M31's most metal rich globular clusters. These data allow photometry of individual stars in the clusters and their surrounding fields. However, to achieve our goals -- obtain accurate…