High-Precision Parallaxes and Their Astrophysical Applications

Hst/fgs Parallaxes of Am Cvn Stars and Astrophysical Consequences

We present absolute parallaxes and relative proper motions for five AM CVn stars, which we obtained using the Fine Guidance Sensors on board the Hubble Space Telescope. Our parallax measurements translate into distances dAMCVn = 606 +135 −93 pc; dHPLib = 197 +14 −12 pc; dCRBoo = 337 +44 −35 pc; dV803Cen = 347 +32 −27 pc; and dGPCom = 75 +2 −2 pc. From these distances we estimate the space densi...

Magentotactic bacteria and their applications

Magentotactic bacteria are the types of bacteria capable of orientation in an external magnetic field because of the ability to produce structures called magnetosomes. Magnetosomes, nanometer-scale structures, are present in most of the magnetotactice bacteria. They are intracellular organelles composed of magnetic iron mineral crystals individually surrounded by a phospholipid layer. Because o...

Sequential Methods and Their Applications

Applications of High Precision Imaging Polarimetry

We propose the use of imaging polarimetry for general photography, which is a relatively young technique allowing the determination of polarized components of the light coming from extended objects or scenes. In this paper high resolution and accurate methods are introduced to determine the two linearly polarized components (Q,U) of light. The CIE Luv color space is used in this work to visuali...

High Precision Arithmetic for Scientific Applications

All but a few digital computers used for scientific computations have supported floating-point and digital arithmetic of rather limited numerical precision. The underlying assumptions were that the systems being studied were basically deterministic and of limited complexity. The ideal scientific paradigm was the orbits of the major planets, which could be observed with high precision, predicted...