Gaia People

Daniel Michalik

Lund Observatory

Daniel Michalik works as a research project assistant at Lund Observatory in Sweden. His research work focuses on Gaia's core astrometric solution in marginal cases, which occur when sources are observed insufficiently much for a good-quality independent astrometric solution. As part of his PhD thesis "Tycho-Gaia and beyond: Combining data for precision astrometry", he and his advisors invented the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS; image of the week; detailed description; quasar extension). For his thesis, he also researched general mathematical strategies for the generation and incorporation of different prior information in astrometric solutions (HTPM paper; generic approach and theory following Bayes' rule), and evaluated their benefits. For example, TGAS would allow us the detection of hard-to-find long-period giant exoplanets.

Historically, Daniel obtained a Masters degree in Computer Science in September 2009 at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. Until October 2010 he worked as a Young Graduated Trainee at ESAC for the STOC of the LISA Pathfinder mission, and for the AGIS team of Gaia. His duties included the adaption of the AGIS algorithms and its software packages for the data processing of the Japanese astrometry satellite Nano-JASMINE (image of the week; study 1; study 2).

[Published: 1/12/2010 | Updated: 21/03/2016]