Gaia Focused Product RElease (Gaia FPR)

Gaia's Focused Product Release was released on Tuesday 10 October 2023. The data is available from the Gaia Archive (and from Gaia's partner data centres). The Gaia Focused Product Release builds partly on the data period that went into Gaia's Data Release 3 but in case of the Solar System objects extends the stretch of time that forms the basis for the FPR data product. This is fully explained for each data product described below. The five data products together form the Gaia Focused Product Release.

Contents of Gaia FPR

Gaia Focused Product Release contains:

1. Astrometry and photometry from engineering images taken in the omega Centauri region.
2. The first results of quasars' environment analysis for gravitational lenses search.
3. Extended radial velocity epoch data for Long Period Variables.
4. Diffuse Interstellar Bands from aggregated RVS spectra.
5. Updated astrometry for Solar System objects.

The pre-main sequence accretion parameters, as initially announced to be part of the Gaia Focused Product Release, has been postponed to Gaia's Data Release 4.

Gaia FPR products overview

Find below an overview of the Gaia Focused Product Release and how it fits together with Gaia Data Release 3:

Details on Gaia FPR products

Astrometry and photometry from engineering images taken in the Omega Centauri region.

Sources based on Service Interface Function (SIF) images of very dense regions in the sky. These sources build an add-on catalogue to the nominal Gaia catalogue. Nominal and SIF detections were not mixed to create these sources. These sources are thus obtained from SIF image detections only. Sources already present in the nominal catalogue were removed from the SIF add-on catalogue.

The publication consists mainly of

• Astrometric information (position, parallax and proper motion) for 526,457 new Gaia sources as derived from the SIF images (with 130 additional sources with positions only).
• Photometric information (mean G magnitude and flux) for these same 526,587 sources as derived from the SIF images.

Full description of this data product is provided in the paper: Gaia Focused Product Release: Sources from Service Interface Function image analysis - half a million new sources in omega Centauri by Gaia Collaboration, K. Weingrill, et al.

first results of quasars' environment analysis for gravitational lenses search

A list of sources around quasar candidates with minimum angular separation of 0.3 arcseconds to be used for gravitational lenses search.

The publication consists mainly of:

• A table of 4.8 million sources (named components), based on an analysis of the observations in the neighbourhood of a list of 3.8 million quasar candidates. This table provides the mean astrometry and mean onboard photometry of the sources
• The analysis of this table by several artificial intelligence algorithms led to the selection of a list of 381 gravitational lens candidates that are presented in the associated Gaia Collaboration paper. The 4.8 million sources with their scores to be a lens are available at CDS.
• A table of individual epoch observations linked to their corresponding source (component), with their celestial coordinates and onboard magnitudes.
• A table of individual epoch observations classified as outliers and rejected by our clustering analysis, with their celestial coordinates and onboard magnitudes

Full description of this data product is provided in the Gaia Collaboration paper: "Gaia Focused Product Release: A catalogue of sources around quasars to search for strongly lensed quasars" by Gaia Collaboration, A. Krone-Martins, et al.

Extended radial velocity epoch data for Long Period Variables

For a list of Long Period Variables, the radial velocity time series will be published.

The publication consists mainly of:

• Table with the epoch radial velocity data points for a sub-set of variable stars.
• Statistical parameters of radial velocity time series for these Long Period Variables

Full description of this data product is provided in the paper: Gaia Focused Product Release: Radial velocity time series of long-period variables by Gaia Collaboration, M. Trabucchi, et al.

Interstellar Medium: Diffuse Interstellar Bands

A main table of Diffuse Interstellar Band (DIB) parameters from DIB-Spec pipeline will be published, as derived from spectra binned in galactic latitude, longitude and distance.

The publication consists mainly of:

• A table of fitted Diffuse Interstellar Band parameters together with the uncertainties of the DIB at 862.1 nm and 864.8 nm for each voxel (volume pixel) which is defined according to the equatorial coordinates and the distance.
• A spectra table containing the stacked Interstellar Medium spectra for each voxel which is defined according to the galactic coordinates and the distance.

Full description of this data product is provided in the paper: Gaia Focused Product Release: Spatial distribution of two diffuse interstellar bands by Gaia Collaboration, M. Schultheis, et al.

Updated astrometry for Solar System objects

The publications concerns epoch astrometry of asteroids and natural satellites of the planets, collected by Gaia over 66 months. All objects in this Focused Product Release were already present in the Gaia Data Release 3. In addition, asteroid orbits derived from Gaia data are provided. No additional photometric or spectroscopic data are published.

The publication consists mainly of:

• Updated epoch astrometry of the Solar System objects from Gaia's Data Release 3
• Orbits of the Solar System Objects from Gaia's Data Release 3 computed with 66 months of data instead of 34 months.

Full description of this data product is provided in the paper: Gaia Focused Product Release: Asteroid orbital solution by Gaia Collaboration, P. David, et al.

Background of the data

Most data products in the Gaia Focused Product Release, e.g. 'Extended radial velocity epoch data for Long Period Variables', 'Diffuse Interstellar Bands from aggregated RVS spectra' and 'The first results of quasars' environment analysis for gravitational lenses search', are based on data collected between 25 July 2014 (10:30 UTC) and 28 May 2017 (08:44 UTC) spanning a period of 34 months of data collection. This leads to a reference epoch of 2016.0, which is the same reference epoch as applicable to Gaia EDR3 and Gaia DR3.

The 'Updated astrometry for Solar System objects' in Gaia's focused Product Release are based on data collected from 26 July 2014 to 20 January 2020, spanning a period of 66 months of data collection.

The 'Astrometry and photometry from engineering images taken in the Omega Centauri region' are based on data collected since 1 January 2015.

Remember that the reference epoch is different for each Gaia data release, and that the reference epoch for Gaia DR2 was J2015.5 (based on 22 months of data) and for Gaia DR1 was J2015.0 (based on 14 months of data).

Positions and proper motions are referred to the ICRS, to which the optical reference frame defined by Gaia DR3 (Gaia-CRF3) is aligned. The time coordinate for Gaia FPR results is the barycentric coordinate time (TCB).

Gaia Source Identifiers

Sources in the Gaia Catalogue are all identified through the Gaia Source Identifier, i.e., the source_id field in the various tables in the Gaia Archive. The construction of the source identifiers is explained in the archive documentation (for Gaia DR1, see the data model section). In particular, the source_id number contains rough information about the source position on the sky.

As explained in previous announcements, there are various reasons why the identifier of a specific source may change or disappear when going from the Gaia DR1 to the Gaia DR2 source list and on to the Gaia DR3 source list and further. Users of Gaia data should thus be aware that the source list for Gaia DR3 should be treated as independent from Gaia DR2 and from Gaia DR1. With each new Gaia data release, the source list is becoming progressively more stable.

The Gaia source names ('designations') for Gaia FPR are all constructed as follows:

Gaia FPR yyy....yy

or

Gaia DR3 yyy....yy

​​​​​dependent on the data product.

Limitations of Gaia FPR

More information on the limitations of each data product in Gaia's Focused Product Release will be available from the Gaia Collaboration papers accompanying the release of the data.

Passbands

Gaia DR3 passbands are offered to users as a record to understand how the Gaia DR3 magnitudes are computed, and to eventually reproduce analysis of data made by other DPAC Coordination Units. The Gaia DR3 passbands are relevant for some of the Gaia FPR data products.

Accessing the DATA

The Gaia Archive is the main point of access to the Gaia FPR data, but the data is also served from our partner data centres (CDS, ASDC, ARI, AIP and Flatiron). Data can be extracted from the Gaia Archive by performing ADQL queries and downloading the corresponding results tables.

The full Gaia FPR data set is downloadable from the Gaia Archive as a set of compressed ECSV files. The total size is about 15 GB.

Documentation

Data release documentation is provided along with each data release in the form of a downloadable PDF and a webpage. Please visit the Gaia Archive to access this documentation, and make sure to go through all relevant information given from the documentation overview page.

Known issues with Gaia Focused Product Release

A list of issues with the data or info given along with the data will be made available and linked to from this webpage when such issues are found. In case you find an issue with the data yourself, please contact the Gaia Helpdesk to let us know.

Data model

The Gaia FPR data model describes all tables together with the names and contents of the columns inside each table. This information is available from the Gaia Archive along with the data release documentation.

data model for Gaia's Focused Product Release is published now

Data Release papers

Along with the Gaia FPR data release documentation, several data processing papers are published describing the specifics of the data processing and validation performed by the different teams of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), responsible for the data products in the Gaia FPR.

Please be aware that the Gaia FPR papers are in some cases complemented with the Gaia DR3 papers and Gaia EDR3 papers which were published with the Gaia EDR3 and Gaia DR3 release.

Data Releases in numbers

Find below an overview of the Gaia Focused Product Release and how it fits together with Gaia Data Release 3: