Astrometry

Perex

The task of astrometry is to accurately determine the positions and movements of stars and other bodies in the universe. This discipline has a very long history. The first catalogues contained only hundreds of stars. Thanks to improved measurement and observation techniques, these catalogues have expanded over time. Currently, the most complete catalogue is created from data collected by the Gaia Space Observatory.  Most of the data in the catalogue are related to our Galaxy, and the Gaia mission is to create a 3D map of it.

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The Gaia map attracted our attention a few years ago. At that time, we were mainly interested in the methods used to analyse data from the ALICE spectrometer at CERN. Above all, it was the investigation of azimuthal asymmetries of particles produced during heavy-ion collisions. Statistical analysis of azimuthal asymmetries motivated us to develop a more general method for identifying different types of clustering in 2D and 3D patterns. We tried to use this method in astrometry. From the freely available Gaia data (catalogue DR2) we managed to "filter out" the catalogue of physical binary stars with angular and spatial separation > 0.5as and < 0.15pc. With a total of about 80,000 candidates, we have created the most comprehensive catalogue of physical double stars in the region available with Gaia astrometric resolution. The Gaia data offers a number of other statistical analyses. We intend to explore some of them in the next steps.

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