Related papers: The Wilson--Bappu Effect: a tool to determine stel…
Line-of-sight extinction estimates to well-studied young T Tauri and Herbig Ae/Be stars are based on many different measurements and analysis methods. This has resulted in wide scatter among the published $A_V$ values for the same star. In…
(Abridged) We study the stellar populations of 14 elliptical galaxies in the Virgo cluster. We propose an alternative approach to the standard side-band method to measure equivalent widths (EWs). Our Boosted Median Continuum maps the EWs…
The growing ``Hubble tension'' has prompted the need for precise measurements of cosmological distances. This paper demonstrates a purely geometric approach for determining the distance to extragalactic binaries through a joint analysis of…
Context: Studies of extremely metal-poor stars indicate that chemical abundance ratios [X/Fe] have an rms scatter as low as 0.05 dex (12 \%). It remains unclear whether this reflects observational uncertainties or intrinsic astrophysical…
We study how the combined observation of dark matter in various direct detection experiments can be used to determine the phenomenological properties of WIMP dark matter: mass, spin-dependent (SD) and spin-independent (SI) scattering cross…
Accurate measurement of galaxy structures is a prerequisite for quantitative investigation of galaxy properties or evolution. Yet, the impact of galaxy inclination and dust on commonly used metrics of galaxy structure is poorly quantified.…
In the last decades we witnessed an increase in studies of open clusters of the Galaxy, especially because of the good determination for a wide range of values of parameters such as age, distance, reddening, and proper motion. The reliable…
We present a new study of late-type eclipsing binary stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) undertaken with the aim of improving the distance determination to this important galaxy. A sample of 10 new detached, double-lined eclipsing…
This paper presents an orbital analysis of six southern single-lined spectroscopic binary systems. The systems selected were shown to have circular or nearly circular orbits (e < 0.1) from earlier published solutions of only moderate…
We present the results of PSR$\pi$, a large astrometric project targeting radio pulsars using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). From our astrometric database of 60 pulsars, we have obtained parallax-based distance measurements for all…
White dwarf cooling sequences provides a useful indicator of the evolutionary time scales involved in the chronometry and star formation history of the galactic disk and, for this reason, the luminosity function of white dwarfs has become a…
An improved formula for the timing of binary pulsars that accounts for the relativistic deflection of light in the gravitational field of the pulsar's companion is presented, and the measurability of this effect together with its variance…
We developed a new approach to provide accurate estimates of metal content, reddening and true distance modulus of RR Lyrae stars (RRLs). The method is based on homogeneous optical ($BVI$) and near-infrared ($JHK$) mean magnitudes and on…
We have investigated the possibility of inferring peculiar velocities for clusters of galaxies from the Doppler shift of scattered cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons. We find that if the core radius of the gas distribution or the…
We present the first scaling relation between weak-lensing galaxy cluster mass, $M_{WL}$, and near-infrared luminosity, $L_K$. Our results are based on 17 clusters observed with wide-field instruments on Subaru, the United Kingdom Infrared…
The pulsational method to estimate the absolute magnitudes of RR Lyrae stars is updated with new data on field-star metallicities by Layden, a new calibration of the (B-V)_0-temperature correlation from recent atmospheric models by Bell and…
Towards the end of their evolution hot massive stars develop strong stellar winds and appear as emission line stars, such as WR stars or LBVs. The quantitative description of the mass loss in these important pre-SN phases is hampered by…
Red clump stars are fundamental distance indicators in astrophysics, although theoretical stellar models predict a dependence of absolute magnitudes with ages. This effect is particularly strong below 2 Gyr, but even above this limit a mild…
We apply the stellar locus method to synthetic $(BP-RP)_{XPSP}$ and $(BP-G)_{XPSP}$ colors derived from corrected Gaia BP/RP (XP) spectra to obtain precise estimates of metallicity for about 100 million stars in the Milky Way (34 million…
We present a new distance determination to the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds using the newly developed red clump stars method (Paczynski and Stanek 1998). This new, single-step, Hipparcos calibrated method seems to be one of the most…