ESA Gaia Science Community - Gaia

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Gaia news, stories & highlights

Gaia Bulletin #02

11 February 2025

Gaia Bulletin #02 is out now!

2025-02-11 Follow-up campaign to observe the Gaia spacecraft

11 February 2025

Many citizen astronomers have observed the Gaia spacecraft while it is more easily visible in the night sky and shared their observations with us. A dedicated webpage to cover this follow-up campaign has just been published and can be found here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/ground-based-observations-of-gaia-spacecraft-2025.

2025-02-06 Gaia symposium at European Astronomical Society annual meeting

6 February 2025

In June 2025, the European Astronomical Society will meet for its annual meeting. A symposium related to the Gaia mission is planned, Symposium S1 "The (TWO) Billion Star Galaxy Census: Anticipating the Leap in Understanding of Planets, Stars, the Milky Way with Gaia DR4"... read more

2025-02-05 Wobbling stars reveal hidden companions in Gaia data

5 February 2025

Today a story was published on esa.int/gaia on the discovery of an exoplanet Gaia-4b, which was hinted to exist purely from Gaia astrometric data. Find the full story here: Wobbling stars reveal hidden companions in Gaia data: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Wobbling_stars_reveal_hidden_companions_in_Gaia_data

2025-01-23 Gaia's schedule for tests has changed

23 January 2025

The schedule of the Gaia tests has changed. Gaia is remaining at maximum brightness for longer than initially planned. The Gaia ephemeris service remains valid and should be used for planning ground-based observations.The schedule will be updated here as soon as possible.

2025-01-19 Follow-up opportunities for Gaia

19 January 2025

Though Gaia stopped taking science observations, it is hard at work to perform a set of technology tests. As part of these tests, Gaia's angle with respect to the Sun will change, and the Gaia spacecraft's brightness is gradually increasing at the moment. While Gaia was a faint object in the sky during its science observation phase, it could... read more

2025-01-15 So long and thanks for all the fish! Last stars observed by Gaia this morning

15 January 2025

Today marks the end of Gaia's science observation phase. A story was published: "Last starlight for ground-breaking Gaia" on ESA's website, along with brand new visuals of our Milky Way (face-on) as well as edge-on. All visuals can be found from The Milky Way page on Gaia Cosmos along with a new animation featuring the Milky Way. An... read more

2025-01-15 61 Cygni marks the end of Gaia's science observation phase

15 January 2025

Gaia's observation programme came to an end today, on 15 January 2025, after ten and a half years of regular sky scanning, netting all the way more than 2600 billion astrometric observations. The measurement of the parallaxes of at least one billion stars was one of the major objectives of the mission at selection time. The results so far... read more

2025-01-13 Self-registration is working again

13 January 2025

The issue with the self-registration has been fixed now.

2024-12-20 Self-registration portlet is not working properly

20 December 2024

Following the migration of our web portal on Monday 16 December, some of our portlets are not yet fully functioning. The self-registration portlet, used for registering an account with our Gaia Archive, is currently having issues, not allowing all steps for the registration to be taken. Our apologies for the inconvenience. Our IT teams have... read more