From Exoplanetary Systems to the Cosmic Distance Scale: Astrometry with the Hubble Space Telescope

Details From Exoplanetary Systems to the Cosmic Distance Scale: Astrometry with the Hubble Space Telescope From Exoplanetary Systems to the Cosmic Distance Scale: Astrometry with the Hubble Space Telescope

May 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008aas...212.8001b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #212, #80.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.263

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While spectacularly successful at locating previously unknown companions to stars, the high-precision radial velocities provided by Doppler spectroscopy only provides a minimum mass, not the actual companion mass. While spectacularly successful at providing parallaxes for thousands of nearby stars, HIPPARCOS could not reliably provide 10% parallaxes for stars more distant than 100pc. Astrometry with Hubble Space Telescope provides both.
I describe how we obtain sub-millisecond of arc precision astrometry from white-light interferometers aboard HST, the Fine Guidance Sensors, and review our reduction and analysis procedures. These permit us to essentially model a three dimensional volume of space to extract the periodic motion of interest, be it a perturbation due to an unseen companion, or a parallax.
Specific results include exoplanet masses and a hint at exoplanetary system architecture. Is coplanarity another attribute of our own Solar System not necessarily the norm for exoplanetary systems? We have made significant contributions to the cosmic distance scale. Our parallax for the Pleiades supports the validity of modern stellar interiors modeling. We now have 10% or better precision parallaxes for ten Galactic, solar-metallicty Cepheids, resulting in a Period-Luminosity relation that provides distances to the LMC and NGC 4258.
The future of space astrometry looks bright. In the short term the FGS will produce more exoplanet masses, more tests of coplanarity, and a Pop II Period-Luminosity relation. Longer-term we have the promise of a billion parallaxes from Gaia with errors of order 25 microarcseconds and thousands at the 4 microarcsecond level from SIM. In the exoplanetary arena, Gaia will determine masses down to Neptune and test coplanarity for hundreds of systems. SIM, with narrow-angle microarcsecond precision, could find the first Earth-mass companions around the nearest stars.
Past and present research depends on support from numerous NASA grants from STScI and/or JPL, all gratefully acknowledged.

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