Gaia Bulletin Archive

 

Gaia Bulletin #08

Gaia data user notifications covering April 2026 - July 2026

 

Gaia mission updates

 

News on the Gaia Archive and Data

  • Gaia Data Release 4 overview page has expanded now with links to the Gaia DR4 software tools, Gaia DR4 draft data model, and the Gaia DR4 pre-release.
  • The Gaia data release 4 pre-release contains the astrometric timeseries of a small sample of Gaia DR4 stars. A software tool to explore them has been released along with it. The pre-release allows the community to get familiar with this new Gaia data product coming out on 2 December.
  • The titles of the more than 70 papers that are being prepared for publication with Gaia Data Release 4 are available from the Gaia DR4 papers page.
  • The Gaia Data Release 4 contents summary page was updated with a link to the draft data model, and an overview of the number of items in every Gaia DR4 data products along with the data volume. The page lists all planned products for the Gaia DR4 archive, except the ones associated with Performance Verification Papers. These papers and their data sets are being prepared at this stage and the information will be provided later.
  • The Gaia DR4 preview stories discuss the ongoing processing and validation of Gaia Data Release 4, and highlight the planned data products. Keep an eye out for new previews over the course of 2026.
  • A new page concerning notebooks has been created on the Gaia Archive help pages.
  • It is strongly suggested to use the Gaia Archive as a registered user. Access as a registered user gives benefits like your own user space and the ability to share tables with other Gaia Archive registered users.

 

Gaia stories or visuals published across ESA websites

 

Gaia meetings and workshops

 

Gaia PhD theses

A list of PhD theses related to Gaia can be found on this page. Please make us aware of Gaia-related theses using the process described here.

 

Miscellaneous

  • An update was made to the Gaia community tools page.
  • Did you know Gaia Data Release 4 will contain data on 2.8 billion sources?
  • With each data release, specific tutorials and help information are made available. When a new data release is published, all help information is reviewed and updated to reflect the new data release. Sometimes, a tutorial becomes obsolete with a new release, while it remains valuable for a former data release. In those cases, the tutorial is moved into the "historical help content".
  • Did you know Gaia scanned  the sky with several different scanning laws over the course of its life? It started with the "ecliptic-poles scanning law (EPSL)" in the first month of its nominal operations, then continued with the nominal scanning law (NSL) for the rest of the nominal mission operations. Moving into mission extension with the Whitehead Eclipse Avoidance Manoeuvre, Gaia moved to perform the "reverse-precession scanning law" for a year, and then moved back to the nominal scanning law for the remainder of the mission extension. The full mission scanning law pointings are available from the Gaia auxiliary data.
  • Did you know that Gaia source-ids are unique for each data release? With each data release, the matching of observations to sources is improved. Sometimes sources are combined into a single source, or what was thought to be a single source initially, can turn out to be multiple sources after all. A crossmatch table is provided between the different data releases.
  • Did you know that some of the Gaia release papers are collaboration papers? These papers have as first author "Gaia Collaboration". When citing these papers, please do not drop the "Gaia Collaboration" from the citation. These papers were specifically published as Gaia Collaboration papers in view of giving the full Gaia collaboration credit for their work.
  • An update was performed to the Gaia posters page, which now contains links to the Milky Way map poster, the anatomy of the Milky Way, and the multi-dimensional Milky Way poster.
  • Did you know Gaia Data Release 3 celebrated its 4th anniversary on 13 June?

 

ESA Science Newsletter

An overview of ESA's Science Programme is given at https://www.science.esa.int. The Newsletter of ESA's Directorate of Science serves the scientific community with programmatic and technical news. Instructions for how to subscribe can be found at https://cosmos.esa.int/web/scinews.

Gaia Bulletin #07

Gaia data user notifications covering December 2025 - April 2026

 

Gaia mission updates

News on the Gaia Archive and Data

 

Gaia meetings and workshops

 

Gaia PhD theses

A list of PhD theses related to Gaia can be found on this page. Please make us aware of Gaia-related theses using the process described here.

 

Miscellaneous

  • Interested in both Gaia and Plato data? The annoucement of opportunity call for Plato's guest observers programme is now open (deadline 21 May). More details here.
  • Find the updated library of peer-reviewed Gaia publications here. With a yearly publication rate of approximately 2000 papers, the total now surpassed 16,000.
  • An update was made to the Gaia community tools page and the information is now provided in a more accessible way.
  • Did you know you can already work with some real Gaia astrometric epoch data of a stellar source? With the publication of Gaia Black Hole 3, the largest black hole of stellar origin in the Milky Way known to date, some code and data snippets were released under tools: Gaia Black Hole 3 Tools.

 

ESA Science Newsletter

An overview of ESA's Science Programme is given at https://www.science.esa.int. The Newsletter of ESA's Directorate of Science serves the scientific community with programmatic and technical news. Instructions for how to subscribe can be found at https://cosmos.esa.int/web/scinews.

Gaia Bulletin #06

Gaia data user notifications covering November - December 2025

 

News on the Gaia Archive and Data

  • The Gaia Archive was upgraded at the start of December. Unfortunately, several performance issues surfaced following the upgrade, for which temporary workaround solutions are provided while we work to resolve the issues.
  • The Gaia Data Release 4 contents summary page was updated. The page now lists all planned products and tables in the Gaia DR4 archive, except the ones associated with Performance Verification Papers. 
  • The Gaia Data Release 4 overview page is the main entry point to all information around Gaia Data Release 4. Gaia Data Release 4 is expected in December 2026 and will be based on 66 months of data.
  • A new Gaia DR3 known issue was published in relation to the external catalogue CatWISE2020.
  • The Gaia DR4 preview stories discuss the ongoing processing and validation of Gaia Data Release 4, and highlight the planned data products. Keep an eye out for new previews over the course of 2026.

 

Gaia meetings and workshops


Gaia stories published across ESA websites

 

Gaia PhD theses

A list of PhD theses related to Gaia can be found on this page. Please make us aware of Gaia-related theses using the process described here.

 

Miscellaneous

 

ESA Science Newsletter

An overview of ESA's Science Programme is given at https://www.science.esa.int. The Newsletter of ESA's Directorate of Science serves the scientific community with programmatic and technical news. Instructions for how to subscribe can be found at https://cosmos.esa.int/web/scinews.

Gaia Bulletin #05

Gaia data user notifications covering July - October 2025

 

Gaia mission updates

 

News on the Gaia Archive and Data

 

Gaia meetings and workshops


Gaia stories published across ESA websites

 

Gaia PhD theses

A list of PhD theses related to Gaia can be found on this page. Please make us aware of Gaia-related theses using the process described here.

 

Miscellaneous

 

ESA Science Newsletter

An overview of ESA's Science Programme is given at ​https://www.science.esa.int​. The Newsletter of ESA's Directorate of Science serves the scientific community with programmatic and technical news. Instructions for how to subscribe can be found at https://cosmos.esa.int/web/scinews.

Gaia Bulletin #04

Gaia data user notifications covering May 2025 – July 2025

 

Gaia mission updates

  • Gaia Data Release 4 is expected in December 2026 and will be based on 66 months of data, see the ​​​​​​​Gaia Data Release scenario page.
  • While the Gaia spacecraft was passivated after collecting 126 months of science data, the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium is working to prepare the next data releases. Gaia Data Release 3 is based on 34 months of data, which means that most of Gaia's data is yet to be released.

 

News on the Gaia Archive and Data

 

Gaia meetings and workshops


Gaia stories published across ESA websites

 

Gaia PhD theses

A list of PhD theses related to Gaia can be found on this page. Please make us aware of Gaia-related theses using the process described here.

 

Miscellaneous

 

ESA Science Newsletter

The Newsletter of ESA's Directorate of Science serves the scientific community with programmatic and technical news. Instructions for how to subscribe can be found at https://cosmos.esa.int/web/scinews.

Gaia Bulletin #03

Gaia data user notifications covering February 2025 – May 2025

 

Gaia mission updates

 

News on the Gaia Archive and Data

 

Gaia meetings and workshops


Gaia stories published across ESA websites

 

Gaia PhD theses

A list of PhD theses related to Gaia can be found on this page. Please make us aware of Gaia-related theses using the process described here.

 

Miscellaneous

  • A new overview with presentations of the Gaia mission is available here.

 

ESA Science Newsletter

The Newsletter of ESA's Directorate of Science serves the scientific community with programmatic and technical news. Instructions for how to subscribe can be found at https://cosmos.esa.int/web/scinews.

Gaia Bulletin #02

Gaia data user notifications covering December 2024 – February 2025

 

Gaia mission updates

 

Gaia stories published across ESA websites

 

Recent stories on Gaia Cosmos website

 

News on the Gaia Archive and Data

 

Gaia PhD theses

A list of PhD theses related to Gaia can be found on this page. Please make us aware of Gaia-related theses using the process described here.

 

Gaia meetings and workshops

In June 2025, a Symposium S1 "The (TWO) Billion Star Galaxy Census: Anticipating the Leap in Understanding of Planets, Stars, the Milky Way with Gaia DR4" is planned at the EAS annual meeting. The symposium now welcomes abstract submissions here. Abstract submission closes on 3 March 2025.

 

Miscellaneous

Gaia Bulletin #01

Gaia data user notifications covering April - December 2024

 

Introducing the Gaia Bulletin

The communication format known as the "Gaia newsletter" has been discontinued. Its successor is the current "Gaia Bulletin". Previous subscribers of the Gaia newsletter have been automatically subscribed to the Gaia Bulletin. New subscribers to the Gaia Bulletin can register at esacontact.esa.int/gaia-bulletin-subscribe/. To unsubscribe from the Gaia bulletin, please follow the instructions given on this page.

 

ESA Science Newsletter

Interested in various ESA science missions and the future of its science programme? ESA has launched the science newsletter, serving the scientific community with programmatic and technical news. Past science newsletters and instructions for how to subscribe can be found here: https://cosmos.esa.int/web/scinews.

 

Gaia mission updates

 

Gaia stories published across ESA websites

If you are planning to publish exciting, peer-reviewed results based on Gaia data, we may be able to enhance the visibility of your research with an ESA news release. Please see https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/communicating-your-results for instructions on how to proceed.

These are the stories published in the last months:

 

Recent stories on Gaia Cosmos website

 

News on the Gaia archive and data

 

Gaia PhD theses

A list of PhD theses related to Gaia can be found on this page. 10 new theses were added to the list. Please make us aware of Gaia-related theses using the process described here.

 

Gaia meetings and workshops (past and future)

  • 30 September - 2 October 2024: 15th Gaia Science Alerts and ORP Time-Domain workshop. Find the recorded sessions from the workshop page.
  • 1 - 5 July 2024: Gaia symposium at EAS "The (TWO) Billion Star Galaxy Census: from the Solar System to our Milky Way and beyond". Find the presentations from the GREAT wiki page.
  • 9 - 11 September 2024: Third GaiaUnlimited community workshop. More details with some summaries available here.

 

Miscellaneous

 

Gaia Bulletin archive

July 2026 - Gaia Bulletin #08
April 2026 - Gaia Bulletin #07
December 2025 - Gaia Bulletin #06
October 2025 - Gaia Bulletin #05
July 2025 - Gaia Bulletin #04
May 2025 - Gaia Bulletin #03
February 2025 - Gaia Bulletin #02
December 2024 - Gaia Bulletin #01

 

How to subscribe / unsubscribe?

Find more info on the Gaia Bulletin here.

 

Gaia newsletters (Discontinued)

Gaia newsletters were sent from 2018-2024. Old Gaia newsletters can be found here.

 

DPAC newsletters (discontinued)

DPAC newsletters were sent from 2008-2014. Old DPAC newsletters can be found here.