Related papers: Testing general relativity by micro-arcsecond glob…
The ESA cornerstone mission Gaia was successfully launched in 2013, and is now scanning the sky to accurately measure the positions and motions of about two billion point-like sources of 3<V<20.5 mag, with the main goal of reconstructing…
The {\Gaia} astrometric mission was approved by the European Space Agency in 2000 and the construction of the spacecraft and payload is on-going for a launch in late 2012. {\Gaia} will continuously scan the entire sky for 5 years, yielding…
The geodetic VLBI technique is capable of measuring the Sun's gravity light deflection from distant radio sources around the whole sky. This light deflection is equivalent to the conventional gravitational delay used for the reduction of…
We measure the speed of light with current observations, such as Type Ia Supernova, galaxy ages, radial BAO mode, as well as simulations of forthcoming redshift surveys and gravitational waves as standard sirens. By means of a Gaussian…
We present GaiaHub, a publicly available tool that combines $Gaia$ measurements with $Hubble$ $Space$ $Telescope$ ($HST$) archival images to derive proper motions (PMs). It increases the scientific impact of both observatories beyond their…
We compute the PPN parameters $\gamma$ and $\beta$ for general scalar-tensor theories in the Einstein frame, which we compare to the existing PPN formulation in the Jordan frame for alternative theories of gravity. This computation is…
Gaia will obtain astrometry and spectrophotometry for essentially all sources in the sky down to a broad band magnitude limit of G=20, an expected yield of 10^9 stars. Its main scientific objective is to reveal the formation and evolution…
Gaia is a fully-approved all-sky astrometric and photometric survey due for launch in 2011. It will measure accurate parallaxes and proper motions for everything brighter than G=20 (ca. 10^9 stars). Its primary objective is to study the…
In this paper we first calculate the post-Newtonian gravitoelectric secular rate of the mean anomaly of a test particle freely orbiting a spherically symmetric central mass. Then, we propose a novel approach to suitably combine the…
Gaia's milli-arcsec (mas) astrometric precision allows systematic identification of optically-selected sub-kpc dual active galactic nuclei (AGN), off-nucleus AGN, and small-scale lensed quasars by `varstrometry' -- where variability-induced…
Context. The Gaia mission has opened up a new era for the precise astrometry of stars, thus revolutionizing our understanding of the Milky Way. However, beyond a few kiloparseconds from the Sun, parallax measurements become less reliable,…
We describe the preliminary results of a ground-based observing campaign aimed at building a grid of approximately 200 spectro-photometric standard stars (SPSS), with an internal $\simeq 1$\% accuracy (and sub-percent precision), tied to…
The wide binary orbit of Proxima Centauri around $\alpha$ Centauri A and B differs significantly between Newtonian and Milgromian dynamics (MOND). By combining previous calculations of this effect with mock observations generated using a…
Attaining the limit of sub-microarcsecond optical resolution will completely revolutionize fundamental astrometry by merging it with relativistic gravitational physics. Beyond the sub-microarcsecond threshold, one will meet in the sky a new…
Consistency tests for the general relativity (GR) can be performed by constraining the growth index $\gamma$ using the measurements of redshift-space distortions (RSD) in conjunction with other observations. In previous studies, deviations…
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…
Relativistic bending in the vicinity of a massive body is characterized only by the post-Newtonian parameter $\gamma$ within the standard parameterized post-Newtonian formalism, which is unity in General Relativity. Aiming at estimating…
We devise a test of nonlinear departures from general relativity (GR) using time delays in strong gravitational lenses. We use a phenomenological model of gravitational screening as a step discontinuity in the measure of curvature per unit…
We develop a full-covariance formalism for pulsar timing array(PTA) -- astrometry verlap reduction function (ORF) estimators and use it to forecast graviton-mass constraints from a nanohertz stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB).…
We study gravitational lensing by compact objects in gravity theories that can be written in a Post-Post-Newtonian (PPN) framework: i.e., the metric is static and spherically symmetric, and can be written as a Taylor series in m/r, where m…