ESA Gaia Science Community - Gaia

Upcoming Events

29 June - 03 July 2020
European Astronomical Society - Annual Meeting
(Virtual Meeting)
Physical meeting cancelled - virtual meeting instead
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31 August - 3 September 2020
The Local Group: Assembly and Evolution

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Attention
Check the websites of the conferences for most up to date information!
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View Conference / Event Calendar

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Science with 1 billion objects in three dimensions

Welcome to ESA's website for the Gaia Scientific Community

News & Highlights

07/05/2020 Gaia Archive upgrade to version 2.8

On Monday 11 May, a new version of the Gaia Archive will be deployed. The Gaia Archive will hence be unavailable in the morning and should be ready to be accessed again by 13:00 CEST. Apart from some fixes, there is an update to the ADQL supported functions and an improvement with respect to the interoperability with VO tools. More details will be available in the release notes on Monday 11 May from 13:00 CEST.

07/05/2020 Gaps in Gaia DR2 data

A description and overview of gaps in the data stream that underlies the Gaia DR2 data products can be found here.

25/04/2020 Gaia DR2 - second anniversary

Today the Gaia Mission celebrates the second anniversary of Gaia Data Release 2. The Gaia catalogues have been embraced by many scientists across the world. Today, we are proud of the many papers that appeared using our latest release, Gaia DR2. In the past 2 years, almost 3000 refereed papers based on Gaia Data Release 2 have been published. That amounts on average to 4 papers per day. Thank you for using our data with so much enthusiasm! In the meantime, ESA Gaia teams and Gaia DPAC are continuously working towards next data releases. Keep posted with our Gaia newsletter of upcoming releases.

Gaia's first release came out on 14 September 2016. On 25 April 2018, the Gaia Collaboration published its second date release.

20/03/2020 Gaia Newsletter Issue #10

Please find the latest issue of the Gaia Newsletter here.

18/03/2020 Delay of Gaia (E)DR3

The COVID-19 virus is spreading across the globe and its impact is also felt in the Gaia collaboration. The data processing effort is distributed over many European countries which adopt different approaches to fight the pandemic. In some countries, restrictions are very severe and the situation is rapidly changing towards more restrictions everywhere.

The schedule towards Gaia (E)DR3 is already affected and more delays can be anticipated. Those scientists and computer engineers in the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) who can work are now mostly working from home, but their priority is their own health and that of their families. Furthermore, resolving problems with computer hardware takes longer than usual due to the absence of personnel on operational sites.

Therefore, schedule delays of both Gaia Early DR3 and Gaia DR3 are inevitable, but can only be quantified after more clarity of the overall situation has been achieved. As soon as possible, a new schedule for the releases will be announced. While data processing has slowed down, the good news is that Gaia continues to collect valuable science data. With this note we wish everyone good health in the coming times.

06/03/2020 Gaia's latest science stories

Milky Way's warp caused by Galactic collision, Gaia suggests: Astronomers have pondered for years why our galaxy, the Milky Way, is warped. Data from ESA's star-mapping satellite Gaia suggest the distortion might be caused by an ongoing collision with another, smaller, galaxy, which sends ripples through the galactic disc like a rock thrown into water. Further reading here.

Global Gaia campaign reveals secrets of stellar pair: A 500-day global observation campaign spearheaded more than three years ago by ESA’s galaxy-mapping powerhouse Gaia has provided unprecedented insights into the binary system of stars that caused an unusual brightening of an even more distant star. Further reading here.

16/01/2020 Gaia Archive upgrades to https

Please be reminded that the Gaia Archive will only be served using https starting on 3 February 2020, this in order to improve security. Requests to the old http access point will automatically be redirected. However, existing scripts may fail to be rerouted. For example, you may experience problems with old astroquery versions or hard coded URLs. Please update astroquery, or replace http by https in your code when needed. Some examples can be found in the GUI Help => Command line access. Please contact the Gaia Helpdesk if you still experience problems.

12/12/2019 Sampling of the Gaia scanning law now available

Today the sampling of the Gaia scanning law over the 22 month time period covered by the Gaia Data Release 2, including the Ecliptic Pole Scanning at the begin of the mission, is made available from the Gaia Auxiliary Data webpage. Note that this is the commanded attitude of the spacecraft, the actual attitude could deviate from it by up to about 30 arcsec. Find more details here.

Below you can see a visualisation of how Gaia scanned the sky during its first 14 months of operations, so for the time period covered by Gaia Data Release1.