News 2023

Gaia Newsletter #30

Compilation of news and updates from the Gaia mission since late October 2023.

Two traineeship positions available in the Gaia mission

ESA's 2024 trainee positions have been published now, with two of them in the Gaia mission. The first one is at ESTEC in the Netherlands with the topic: "A Gaia view of the constellations across time" which aims to explore the evolution of the constellations, which is not visually susceptible over the lifetime of humans and hence not easy to grasp. Use will be made of Gaia's data to visualise, in a scientifically accurate way, the stellar content of arbitrary constellations at arbitrary moments in time, up to (dozens or hundreds of) millennia in the past or future. More details on this position can be found here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/esac-trainees/a-gaia-view-of-the-constellations-across-time.

The second topic is on periodicity in billions of Gaia astrometric time series and would be supervised from ESAC in Spain. Gaia's fourth data release (GDR4) will contain series of highly-accurate positional measurements for more than 2 billion astronomical sources. These astrometric timeseries carry a wealth of information of astrophysical and technical nature, but only a small fraction are searched for periodic patterns beyond parallax by the Gaia data processing pipelines. The goal of this project is to enable the source-specific discovery of periodic astrometric signals across the entire GDR4 dataset, which will make it possible to discover and study phenomena related to binary stars, black holes, exoplanets, instrumental effects, survey artefacts, and much more.  More details on this internship can be found here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/esac-trainees/periodicity-in-billions-of-gaia-astrometric-timeseries.

Science Advisory Membership - Call for expressions of interest

ESA has published a call for expressions of interest to become a member of the "Astronomy Working Group", the "Solar System and Exploration Working Group" and the "Space Science Advisory Committee". Through this call, the ESA Director of Science invites scientists affiliated with institutions in the ESA Member States to express their interest in being a member.

Full details on this call can be found from this page. The deadline for expressions of interest is 22 January 2024 at noon 12:00 CET.

New Frequently Asked Question: Why does my small (<150 MB) table not fit into my user space?

At first sight, one may be surprised to discover that the storage space for a table uploaded from a local machine to the Archive user space can be easily a number of times larger than expected, possibly raising an error with the message "UWS error [DB quota exceeded ]". In other words, a table of size 150 MB on a laptop can easily inflate to occupy ~900 MB in the Gaia Archive user space. The reason for this significant size increment is that the Gaia Archive uses a relational database to store the vast amount of data hosted in it. Tables in a relational database contain indexes that speed up the access to their content, and these indexes occupy significant disk space. An example of this index is the "<table_name>_oid" extra column that is automatically added by the Archive to each table uploaded to a user space.

Find the full list of frequently asked questions from this page. The list is now also downloadable.

Gaia's presence in the ESA space shop "Real Space Images"

Find Gaia T-shirts and more from the ESA space shop "Real Space Images".  The collection can be found here.

Gaia's history lane

12 October 1993: Proposal for the Gaia mission

11-12 October 2000: Adoption of the Gaia mission by ESA

15 June 2006: Gaia DPAC starts activities  (more info)

7 June 2007: ESA SPC approves DPAC proposal for Gaia data processing

19 December 2013 09:12 UTC: Gaia launch @ Kourou

25 July 2014: Start of routine operations

14 September 2016: Gaia Data Release 1

25 April 2018: Gaia Data Release 2

16 July 2019: Whitehead Eclipse Avoidance Manoeuvre marks the end of nominal mission

3 December 2020: Early Gaia Data Release 3

13 June 2022: Gaia Data Release 3

10 October 2023: Focused Product Release

19 December 2023: coming up... Gaia's launch anniversary - 10 years in space @ L2

Inform us of your Gaia science

ESA makes different kinds of press and web releases for its missions. If you inform us of your Gaia science paper in preparation, we might consider proposing it to the ESA editorial board. If a news item is accepted for an ESA release, the story will be tuned for the general public. Preparation will be done jointly with you, and collaboration with press officers from your institute or the journal can be done under embargo.

When informing us of your science paper in preparation, you can send an email to our Gaia Helpdesk with subject "Communicating Gaia science result" and adding the following information:

• A brief description of the potential result
• Your ideas/suggestions on the main punch lines (what is the most important take-home message)
• A draft of the paper while still in preparation phase. No need to wait until the paper is accepted, the submitted manuscript is fine to start with. The paper draft will be treated confidentially.
• Information on where you are in the rocess. Is the paper a concept, submitted, got a response of the referee, accepted, etc. If any dates are known, please indicate these as well.
• Information on any other communication efforts ongoing. For example at your institute or with the journal.

All submissions are treated confidentially. An example of a science news story can be found here: Artificial brain helps Gaia catching speeding stars. Any story prepared will only be published once the paper is accepted for publication under peer-review.