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Gaia news & highlights

24-06-2022 Gaia DR3 known issue on planetary transits

24 June 2022The Gaia DR3 table named vari_planetary_transit contains information on the period and other properties (transit reference time, depth, duration, etc.) of 41 new planetary transit candidates and 173 known exoplanets (Eyer et al. 2022, Panahi et al. 2022). The data in this table contain serious errors and users are advised not to use them. A...

Gaia DPAC CU8 webinar

23 June 2022Gaia Data Release 3 contains a wealth of new data products for the community. Astrophysical parameters are a major component of this release. They were produced by the Astrophysical parameters inference system (Apsis) within the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. This presentation gives an overview of the over 40 different parameters...

2022-06-13 Is it an asteroid?

13 June 2022Story highlighting the Gaia Solar System Survey published for Gaia Data Release 3, as part of a series of 20 stories. For Gaia’s data release 3 (DR3) an impressive catalogue of 158,152 Solar System objects is published. This data set contains not only asteroids, but also 31 moons of planets in our Solar System. All these measurements (more than...

2022-06-13 How far away are the stars?

13 June 2022Story highlighting the Gaia parallaxes published for Gaia Early Data Release 3 but still applicable to Gaia Data Release 3, as part of a series of 20 stories. How does one know that an object in everyday life is far away or quite close? If one looks at the object, the view from one eye is at a slightly different angle than the view from the...

2022-06-13 Where is the DR3 data?

13 June 2022Story highlighting the Gaia Archive providing access to Gaia Data Release 3, as part of a series of 20 stories. The ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC), located at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC, Madrid, Spain), operates with the motto “Presenting, Promoting, and Preserving Reliable Space Science Data”. It houses a team of experienced...

2022-06-13 Do they go boom?

13 June 2022Story highlighting the Gaia photometric science alerts table published for Gaia Data Release 3, as part of a series of 20 stories. As soon as the scientific data gathered by Gaia has been received on Earth, a software pipeline kicks in to see if there are objects out there going wild. Are they suddenly brightening, or dimming peculiarly? If...

2022-06-13 Do the stars approach us or do they move away?

13 June 2022Story highlighting the Gaia radial velocities published for Gaia Data Release 3, as part of a series of 20 stories. Using the observed Doppler shift of a star’s spectral lines with respect their wavelengths at rest, astronomers are able to measure the velocity along the direction towards the star, that is, if the star is moving away or towards...