What Properties Can Be Extracted from the Hipparcos Catalogue?

[covers]

Hello

I have questions related to the hipparcos catalogue. I like to know what kind of star-properties it is possible to extract from this catalogue.

I was already at the hipparcos-website to try to figure it out myself, but as I am anything else than an expert on the matter, I got very confused about all the attributes in the catalogue. I hope someone here can help me out a little...

As far as I know, I can get the star's distance and its luminosity and of course position from the catalogue. What I like to know is, can I get the following properties also?

-Mass
-Diameter
-Star type (white dwarf, neutron star, red giant, multiple star system, ...)
-temperature
-velocity(transverse / radial)
-age
-...


I know this is somewhat of a general question, but I am really out in the wind here, trying to get a basic Idea of the whole thing, on what's possible and whatnot. Also can I get everything I get out of the hipparcos catalogue out of the Tycho catalogue, only less accurate?

Any help would be great, and really appreciated!

 

[hellfire]

I am not an expert, but I have already used http://archive.ast.cam.ac.uk/hipp/hipparcos.html. It contains the measured data by hipparchos and thus you can find there photometric and astrometric information, but not any (post-processed) information that infers about properties of the stars from the measured data. So, additionally to the magnitude and position, you can find there the parallax and the proper speed. The other information you ask for is not available there.

 

[Nereid]

Hello

I have questions related to the hipparcos catalogue. I like to know what kind of star-properties it is possible to extract from this catalogue.

I was already at the hipparcos-website to try to figure it out myself, but as I am anything else than an expert on the matter, I got very confused about all the attributes in the catalogue. I hope someone here can help me out a little...

As far as I know, I can get the star's distance and its luminosity and of course position from the catalogue. What I like to know is, can I get the following properties also?

-Mass
-Diameter
-Star type (white dwarf, neutron star, red giant, multiple star system, ...)
-temperature
-velocity(transverse / radial)
-age
-...


I know this is somewhat of a general question, but I am really out in the wind here, trying to get a basic Idea of the whole thing, on what's possible and whatnot. Also can I get everything I get out of the hipparcos catalogue out of the Tycho catalogue, only less accurate?

Any help would be great, and really appreciated!

As hellfire said, HIPPARCOS only reports on the parameters it directly observed, and some that are directly derivable. That's the nature of surveys - they aim to report only on what they directly observe.

Some of the other parameters you are interested in are available in other catalogues (radial velocities and some kind of effective temperature can be determined directly from spectra, for example), but others are model dependent, and will come with a wide range of uncertainties (e.g. masses and diameters are much more accurately estimated for (certain kinds of) binaries than for single stars).

 

[covers]

Thanks for your help.

So if I have understood it correctly, temperature and radial velocity is derivable from the data within the hipparcos catalogue?

 

[Nereid]

Thanks for your help.

So if I have understood it correctly, temperature and radial velocity is derivable from the data within the hipparcos catalogue?

No.

They are derivable from the spectra of stars; HIPPARCOS did not observe spectra.

An estimate of the radial velocity comes from the shift of the lines in the spectra - towards the blue or red - corrected for the motion of the observatory, at the time of the observation, with respect to the solar system barycentre. In the case of binaries, a correction for the motion around the common centre of gravity may also be applied (assuming it can be determined).

An estimate of some kind of temperature comes from either an analysis of the strengths of lines, in relevant series, or a general fit of the continuum. These may give different estimates (the lines and continuum may come from different regions of the star), and in any case are only valid in a somewhat narrow sense (think of it like this - what is 'the temperature of the Earth'? There is no one single answer that has general meaning).

 

[covers]

ok, thanks for the explanation. As I read in the documentation of the Hipparcos data, it has astromertic and photomertic data in the catalogue. Do you happen to know what the photometric data is good for then? I know there's a spectral type included in the data also (star class...), is this based on photometric data?

 

[Nereid]

The photometric data (IIRC, there are two sets) simply gives a consistent (?), well-defined value for the apparent magnitude of the star, at a particular epoch (or epochs, if observed more than once, as most of the stars were).

That it is a consistent dataset is very valuable; it provides (potentially) a means of calibrating the ground-based photometric data, which suffers from a wide range of (mostly very well-known) systematic and random errors.

The spectral class data comes from other sources (IIRC, the catalogue lists them).