Gaia DR4 software tools

Gaia data release 4 brings various new and "complex" data products such as time series, spectra, CCD observations, Monte Carlo Markov Chain samples from the astrophysical parameter inference, etc. To help the scientific community use these new or complex data products, several software tools have been developed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. Below a summary of the different software tools is provided.

Some tools are shared with the community to get familiar with the epoch data from Gaia. All other tools will be published along with the Gaia Data Release 4 data on the release day.

Gaia source update tool

Gaia source update demonstrates how to load and process the Gaia DR4 astrometric timeseries for a given source, and to obtain its astrometric parameters assuming the default single-star model. More info here.

Gaia black hole 3 tools

On 16 April 2024, the discovery of Gaia BH3 was announced by ESA in its press release "ESA Press release: Sleeping giant surprises Gaia scientists". The preliminary Gaia data that lead to this discovery was published along with the paper. The code shared here demonstrates the analysis of the Gaia measurement time series that led to the Gaia BH3 discovery.

Gaia data release 4 tutorials on Github

A dedicated list of tutorials for use with the Gaia DR4 data is published on ESA's github page. More tutorials will be added to this list with the data release on 2 December 2026.