Related papers: Astrometry and Relativity
Recent years have seen increasing efforts to directly measure some aspects of the general relativistic gravitomagnetic interaction in several astronomical scenarios in the solar system. After briefly overviewing the concept of…
After exactly a century since the formulation of the general theory of relativity, the phenomenon of gravitational lensing is still an extremely powerful method for investigating in astrophysics and cosmology. Indeed, it is adopted to study…
In General Relativity, the rotation of a gravitating body like the Earth influences the motion of orbiting test particles or satellites in a non-Newtonian way. This causes, e.g., a precession of the orbital plane known as the Lense-Thirring…
Astrometry as a technique has so far proved of limited utility when employed as either a follow-up tool or to independently search for planetary mass companions orbiting nearby stars. However, this is bound to change during the next decade.…
Observational data from the ESA astrometric mission Gaia determining the positions of celestial objects within an accuracy of few microarcseconds will be soon fully available. Other satellite-based space missions are currently planned to…
Large ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO) systems have ushered in a new era of high-resolution infrared photometry and astrometry. Relative astrometric accuracies of <0.2 mas have already been demonstrated from…
I discuss the effects of measurement error on regression and density estimation. I review the statistical methods that have been developed to correct for measurement error that are most popular in astronomical data analysis, discussing…
Space-based time-domain telescopes such as CoRoT, Kepler/K2 and TESS have profoundly impacted astrophysics over the past two decades. Continuous light curves with high cadence and high photometric precision are now available for millions of…
Astrometry, the measurement of positions and motions of the stars, is one of the oldest disciplines in Astronomy, extending back at least as far as Hipparchus' discovery of the precession of Earth's axes in 190 BCE by comparing his catalog…
Astrometric microlensing will offer in the next future a new channel for investigating the nature of both lenses and sources involved in a gravitational microlensing event. The effect, corresponding to the shift of the position of the…
According to general relativity, a spinning body of mass M and angular momentum S, like a star or a planet, generates a gravitomagnetic field which induces, among other phenomena, also the Lense-Thirring effect, i.e. secular precessions of…
Astrometric detection of an unseen companion is based on analysis of apparent motion of its host star around the system's barycentre. Systems with orbital period close to one year may escape detection if orbital motion of their host stars…
Optical interferometry provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Through direct observation of rotationally distorted photospheres at sub-milliarcsecond scales, we are now able to…
The observation of the bending of light by mass, now known as gravitational lensing, was key in establishing general relativity as one of the pillars of modern physics. In the past couple of decades, there has been increasing interest in…
In the last years, we saw more and more attempts to explain dark matter as a general relativistic effect, at least for some fraction. Following this philosophy, we considered the gravitational distortions due to the inhomogeneous…
With the advent of optical interferometers that will be coming online in the next decade, radial velocity searches for extra-solar planets will be complemented by high angular resolution astrometric measurements. In this paper, we explore…
Based on several recent developments in relativistic astrophysics and observational cosmology, this article discusses prospects of (1) theoretical structure of General Relativity (GR) in the new era and (2) submission of GR to new and…
After an introduction on phenomena due to spin and mass-energy currents on clocks and photons, we review the 1995-2001 measurements of the gravitomagnetic field of Earth and Lense-Thirring effect obtained by analyzing the orbits of the two…
An emerging theme in modern astrophysics is the connection between astronomical observations and the underlying physical phenomena that drive our cosmos. Both the mechanisms responsible for the observed astrophysical phenomena and the tools…
The orbital period loss of the compact binary systems is the first indirect evidence of gravitational waves which agrees well with Einstein's general theory of relativity to a very good accuracy. However, there is less than one percent…