Improving distances to nearby bright stars: Combining astrometric data from Hipparcos, Nano-JASMINE and Gaia

TL;DR

This paper explores combining astrometric data from Hipparcos, Nano-JASMINE, and Gaia to improve distance measurements to bright nearby stars by leveraging their complementary strengths.

Contribution

It proposes a method to optimally combine data from three astrometric missions, enhancing the accuracy of stellar distances for bright stars.

Findings

Joint data integration improves distance accuracy.

Long temporal baselines aid in proper motion and binary detection.

Simulations show significant gains over individual datasets.

Abstract

Starting in 2013, Gaia will deliver highly accurate astrometric data, which eventually will supersede most other stellar catalogues in accuracy and completeness. It is, however, lim- ited to observations from magnitude 6 to 20 and will therefore not include the brightest stars. Nano-JASMINE, an ultrasmall Japanese astrometry satellite, will observe these bright stars, but with much lower accuracy. Hence, the Hipparcos catalogue from 1997 will likely remain the main source of accurate distances to bright nearby stars. We are investigating how this might be improved by optimally combining data from all three missions in a joint astrometric solu- tion. This would take advantage of the unique features of each mission: the historic bright-star measurements of Hipparcos, the updated bright-star observations of Nano-JASMINE, and the very accurate reference frame of Gaia. The long temporal baseline between the missions pro- vides additional benefits for the determination of proper motions and binary detection, which indirectly improve the parallax determination further. We present a quantitative analysis of the expected gains based on simulated data for all three missions.