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19 December 2023Celebrate with us Gaia's 10 years in space with stories on stellar occultation, asteroids and moons, spiral arms and structure, stellar companions, special stars, stellar DNA, 3D motion, Milky Way satellites, Gaia's galaxies and cosmology with Gaia. Full details and more...
16 November 2023ESA'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...
31 October 2023Since its launch in 2013 Gaia has repeatedly observed the central stars of Planetary Nebulae (abbreviated by PNe). The name ´Planetary Nebula’ is not related to planets, but arose in the 18th century because of the visual similarity between some round nebulae visible in the sky and the planets Uranus and Neptune as observed in small optical...
10 October 2023Gaia's Focus on long period variables: "Radial velocity time series for long period variables", published for Gaia's Focused Product Release. Read this story for more details on this data product!
10 October 2023Gaia's Focus on a high star density field: "Omega Centauri, a globular cluster bursting with stars", published for Gaia's Focused Product Release. Read this story for more details on this data product!
10 October 2023Gaia's Focus on gravitational lensing: "Gaia's gravitational lens candidates", published for Gaia's Focused Product Release. Read this story for more details on this data product!
10 October 2023Gaia's Focus on solar system objects: "Unlocking the secrets of solar system objects - Gaia's surprising role", published for Gaia's Focused Product Release. Read this story for more details on this data product!
10 October 2023Gaia's Focus on the interstellar medium: "Revealing both strong and weak diffuse interstellar bands with Gaia", published for Gaia's Focused Product Release. Read this story for more details on this data product!
27 September 2023Until now, the Milky Way was estimated to weigh about 1E12 solar masses. Part of this mass consists of the ordinary matter like stars and the cold gas in the Milky Way, expected to weigh about 0.6E11 solar masses. The rest of the mass of the Milky Way is made up of dark matter, a type of matter still unknown to us. The expected dark matter in...
22 September 2023A bit more than a year ago, on 13 June 2022, the third Gaia Data Release (Gaia DR3) was published. It included for the first time an exciting new catalogue of Non-Single Star solutions. This catalogue counts around 440,000 sources with an orbital solution, either astrometric, spectroscopic, or eclipsing.
This data set can be useful in many...
13 September 2023Gaia's Data Processing and Analysis Consortium consists of 9 coordination units, each with their own responsibilities in the preparation of a Gaia data release. Gaia's coordination unit 8 is responsible for the production of the astrophysical parameters. A webinar series was held early 2023 to explain the different processing modules and their...
13 June 2023Today marks the first anniversary of Gaia's data release 3 (Gaia DR3). The largest release published by the Gaia Collaboration so far, based on 34 months of data gathered between July 2014 and May 2017. The first batch of data was release already in December 2020, with Gaia's Early Data Release 3 (Gaia EDR3) and on 13 June 2022 the astrometry...
18 May 2023A renaissance in Galactic studies is well underway, in no small part due to the contributions deriving from the data releases of the Gaia mission, which has become the most cited astrophysics space mission to date. This renaissance is not only thanks to Gaia, but also to astrometric and photometric surveys made at other wavelengths, from the...
15 May 2023The Gaia mission uses the ESA deep space network (DSN) ground stations for communicating with the spacecraft. These stations are shared with other missions such as Mars Express, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo, and are in high demand. Sometimes the available station tracking time is not sufficient for Gaia’s needs and...
25 April 2023Today, 25 April 2023, marks the fifth anniversary of the second Gaia Data Release (Gaia DR2). Gaia DR2 was revolutionary including more than 1300 million sources with five-parameter astrometry (position, parallax, and proper motion) as well as G, GBP, and GRP mean photometry, more than 7 million sources with radial velocities, more than half a...
5 April 2023Today, a Hubble Space Telescope news item reveals follow-up investigations on one of Gaia's dual quasar candidates. Initially, the source (J0749+2255) was identified as a quasar in the SDSS Legacy Survey. After Gaia's Data Release 2, with the use of Gaia's accurate astrometry, the source turned out to be part of a list of candidate dual quasars....
21 March 2023In June 2022, the Gaia consortium published the most extensive catalogue of variable sources over the entire sky as part of Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3). Around 10.5 million variable sources, with classifications into 24 different variability types, were published. The variability catalogue was obtained using machine learning methods in a...
9 February 2023For about 400 years, roughly since the invention of the telescope in the early 17th century, the bright star Albireo has been known to be a beautiful double. Twentieth-century astrophysics characterized the brighter orange partner (“Albireo A”) as a cool giant star of about five to six solar masses, and the fainter blue one (“Albireo B”) as a...
31 January 2023With Gaia's Early Data Release 3 the structure and properties of the Magellanic Clouds were highlighted by the Gaia Collaboration, X. Luri, et al. A&A 2020. The paper demonstrates the quality of the Gaia data and a story discussing these results was published. Now, with the release of almost 34 million line-of-sight velocities with Gaia's full...
25 January 2023The recently published CNS5 catalogue (The Fifth Catalogue of Nearby Stars) is an update to the Gliese-Jahreiß Catalogue of Nearby Stars and contains all known objects located within 25 parsecs (about 81.5 light-years) of the Sun.
The CNS5 contains in total 5931 objects, including 5230 stars and 701 brown dwarfs. Of the stars, 4946 are...
