A new view of the Sun’s neighbourhood

The astrometric data for stars within about 1,500 light years of the Sun provide a rich source of information on the stellar distance scale, stellar evolution models and the local density distribution. A new reduction of the Hipparcos data, providing accuracies several times greater than the original catalogue, has made it possible to compare in detail the relative luminosities for stars in clusters of different ages, to describe the local distribution of stars, and to obtain the first calibration of the period–luminosity relation for Cepheids, based on improved trigonometric distance determinations. This talk will describe our current understanding of the Sun’s neighbourhood in the Galaxy, as well as summarizing the author’s work on the new and improved Hipparcos catalogue.

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About Floor van Leeuwen

Floor van Leeuwen is the technical director of space projects at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. He did his PhD in 1983 at Leiden University on a study of the Pleiades cluster, which included the discovery of the very fast-rotating K dwarfs in that cluster. At the RGO, he led the UK involvement in the Hipparcos data processing, and was a member of the Hipparcos science team from 1984 until 1997, and more recently of the Gaia science team. He recently completed a re-reduction of the Hipparcos astrometric data, published last year by Springer. He is currently leading the UK data processing activities for the Gaia satellite and in particular the photometric data processing for that mission within Europe.