ESA Gaia Science Community - Gaia

Science with 1 billion objects in three dimensions

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Gaia news & highlights

2022-05-19 GaiaXPy 1.0.0 released, a tool for Gaia BP/RP spectra users

19 May 2022The Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) will offer access for the first time to mean low-resolution spectra obtained from a combination of a number of epoch Blue and Red Photometer (BP and RP) observations covering the optical to near-infrared wavelength range [330, 1050] nm. These will be available for about 220 million sources, mostly brighter than...

2022-05-11 Systemic proper motions of 73 galaxies in the Local group

11 May 2022To gain insight in the interactions between our Milky Way and its neighbouring galaxies, knowledge of their position and motion is essential. Using astrometry and photometry from Gaia's Early Data Release 3, a team of scientists from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Spain, led by G. Battaglia, have determined the systemic proper...

2022-05-02 Update to the Gaia DR3 contents summary page

2 May 2022On 28 March an update to the Gaia DR3 contents page was published, giving lots more details on the different data products to be expected in Gaia's full data release 3. Find below the overview table taken from this page. To help prepare for the data release, also find the draft data model now published on this page. At last, a warning that the...

2022-04-28 Publication of the Gaia CRF3 cross match table

28 April 2022A downloadable table providing the location of each of the Gaia CRF3 sources that define the Gaia Celestial Reference Frame has been published today on the Gaia DR3 auxiliary data page. The Gaia Collaboration paper "Gaia Early Data Release 3: The celestial reference frame (Gaia-CRF3) can be found here.

2022-03-28 Gaia query statistics

28 March 2022With the Gaia mission being one of ESA’s power houses in terms of generating scientific results and publications, it is no surprise that the Gaia ESA Archive at the ESAC Science Data Centre is in popular demand. On average, the Archive receives more than 1 query per second (around the clock) defined in the Astronomical Data Query Language...

2022-03-23 Gaia finds parts of the Milky Way much older than expected

23 March 2022Using data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have shown that a part of the Milky Way known as the ‘thick disc’ began forming 13 billion years ago, around 2 billion years earlier than expected, and just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang. Find the latest story "Gaia finds parts of the Milky Way much older than expected" on the ESA portal.

2022-03-16 Gaia's first photo shooting of James Webb

16 March 2022In early 2014, ESA’s space astrometry spacecraft Gaia arrived at its working place near the Earth-Sun Lagrange point L2, about 1.5 million km from the Earth and always in the direction opposite to the Sun. Almost exactly eight years later, in late January 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope took its station at L2, where the combined...