ESA Gaia Science Community - Gaia

Science with 1 billion objects in three dimensions

Welcome to ESA's website for the Gaia Scientific Community

Gaia mission status

Upcoming Events

15 March - 7 May 2021
White Dwarfs as Probes of the Evolution of Planets, Stars, the Milky Way and the Expanding Universe
(Santa Barbara - USA)
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1 - 4 June 2021
Gaia EDR3 workshop
(Virtual)
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7 - 11 June 2021
The predictive power of computational astrophysics as a discovery tool
(Chamonix - France)
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28 June - 2 July 2021
European Astronomical Society- Annual Meeting
(Leiden, The Netherlands)
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View Conference / Event Calendar

News & Highlights

10/03/2021 Gaia EDR3 crossmatch tables released

The remaining crossmatch tables: GSC 2.3, APASS dr9, RAVE dr5, 2MASS PSC XSC, and allWISE are now all available from the Gaia Archive. They are also available from the bulk download section. The data release documentation has been updated accordingly. Make sure to get the most up to date version from our documentation pages.

08/03/2021 Gaia-TESS collaboration kicks off

TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is a NASA space mission surveying nearby bright stars in search of extrasolar planets, pushing ahead the fast-growing and exciting study of planets outside our solar system. TESS finds planets that cross our line of sight to their host stars, causing a periodic dimming of the observed light of the system. TESS is issuing a monthly list of newly discovered candidates of transiting exoplanets. However, TESS angular resolution allows light of each target star to be blended with the light from nearby sources. Therefore, follow-up photometric observations are required in order to exclude apparent transits caused by blending with nearby eclipsing binary stars, before further confirmation observations should be performed.

The Gaia mission has been accumulating brightness measurements of billions of stars, with a high angular resolution, producing distinct brightness time series for all sources whose light might be blended with the TESS planet-host candidate. Therefore, Gaia can quickly identify false positive candidates and even confirm true planets in some cases, synergistically combining the capabilities of two of the astronomical space flagships of the USA and Europe – TESS and Gaia.

The analysis of the Gaia relevant data is done at Tel Aviv University by Aviad Panahi, Tsevi Mazeh and Shay Zucker as members of the Gaia DPAC/CU7 team, and the results are reported to the TESS Quick Look Pipeline manager at MIT and TESS Follow-up Observing Program Working Group (TFOPWG) coordinator.

03/02/2021 Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture for Amina Helmi

The European Astronomical Society (EAS) announced yesterday that the 2021 Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture has been awarded to Prof. Amina Helmi of the University of Groningen for advancing the understanding of how the Milky Way assembled using dynamical simulations combined with Gaia observations of distances, velocities, ages and chemical abundances of stars. Amina Helmi is a member of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium and plays a role in the validation of the Gaia data.

03/02/2021 New release of the Gaia Data Release Documentation

Today a new release of the data release documentation for Gaia EDR3 was published, in anticipation of the release of the second part of the crossmatch tables, which is expected very soon now.

16/02/2021 EAS meeting 2021 - Gaia: The (2) Billion Star Galaxy Census: The Science of EDR3 and the promise of DR3

Registration and abstract submission is now open for the EAS 2021 meeting 28 June - 2 July 2021. As part of the EAS meeting, a two day MW-Gaia / GREAT/ Gaia Symposium will be held on 28-29 June 2021. The programme focuses on science highlights from Gaia EDR3, a status overview on Gaia / Gaia Archive / MW-Gaia / Gaia Unlimited and ground-based synergies with Gaia. As in previous years the programme will consist largely of contributed talks. You are encouraged to submit your abstract (submit to Symposium S15) for the meeting with abstracts from early stage researchers especially welcome. Abstract deadline is 2 March 2021.

18/12/2020 Grand Prize 2020 for Gaia

At its last session on 25 September, the Air and Space Academy (AAE) has awarded its Grand Prize 2020 to Anthony Brown, astronomer at the Leiden Observatory, and Vincent Poinsignon, Gaia satellite project manager at Airbus Defence & Space, for their decisive contribution to the success of the scientific space mission of the Gaia satellite.

03/12/2020 Gaia Early Data Release 3 online now!

Today at 12:00 CET, the Gaia Collaboration released its Gaia Early Data Release 3 catalogue. If you are interested to follow up on some of the events, which are still ongoing, check out our events page. More information on the release can be found from the Gaia Early Data Release 3 overview page. Some stories highlighting the release have been published here.