ESA Gaia Science Community - Gaia

Upcoming Events

19 - 23 August 2019
Stars and their variability as observed from space
(Vienna, Austria)
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3 - 5 September 2019
The Gaia Treasure Hunt
(Cambridge, UK)
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4 - 6 September 2019
Dynamics and physics of asteroids, TNOs, and natural satellites in the new era of Gaia data
(Antalya, Turkey)
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9 - 13 September 2019
A synoptic view on the Magellanic Clouds: VMC, Gaia and beyond
(ESO, Garching, Germany)
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6 - 10 October 2019
ADASS
(Groningen, The Netherlands)
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Welcome to ESA's website for the Gaia Scientific Community

News & Highlights

10/07/2019 Gaia Sky presentation at the 69th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

From June 30 to July 5, 2019, 580 undergraduates, PhD students, and post-doc researchers from all over the world had the opportunity to meet 39 Nobel Laureates (from Physics, Chemistry, and Peace) in Lindau at Lake Constance (Bodensee), Germany.

On the last day of the meeting physics institutes from federal state Baden-Württemberg in the southwest of Germany presented their research during a boat trip to the island Mainau. At one of the most visited booths of this exhibition, Gaia Sky was presenting the Gaia mission and Gaia's second star catalogue with VR glasses. Many visitors, young scientists and Nobel Laureates were impressed by a virtual flight through the solar system with the Gaia satellite and the Milky Way with the stars of Gaia Data Release 2. A first reaction from the visitors when putting on the VR glasses was often a "wow"!

Left: Nobel Prize Laureate George Smoot tries out Gaia Sky. Image credit: T. Sagrista. Right: Ulrich Steinbach, Deputy minister of education in Baden-Württemberg. Image credit: Staatsministerium Baden-Württemberg

This entertaining way to explain the Gaia Mission was also presented through demos at IAU 2018 and EWASS 2019. If you were at one of the demos and want to learn more about the application, then visit either the Gaia Sky website from the Zentrum für Astronomie of the Heidelberg University or download the application from gitlab.

24/06/2019 NWO Spinoza prize for our Gaia DPAC member Amina Helmi

The NWO Spinoza Prize, which is the highest award in Dutch science, was awarded to several researchers working in the Netherlands who belong to the absolute top of science and have done groundbreaking research. Amina Helmi is one of the NWO Spinoza Laureates for her work on the Dynamics, Structure and Formation of the Milky Way at the Kapteyn Institute of the University of Groningen. She is part of Coordination Unit 9 in the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium and participates in the validation of the Gaia data.

23/05/2019 Lorenzoni Prize 2019 for Gaia DPAC member Eloisa Poggio

The Lorenzoni Prize is an award instituted by the Societa' Astronomica Italiana (SAIt) with the sponsorship of "Officina Stellare" (an Italian manufacturing company in the field of design and construction of telescopes and precision opto-mechanical instrumentation for professional applications for scientific research, aerospace and defense) to reward the best scientific article published by a young researcher in the last 3 years.

This year the Lorenzoni Prize was won by Eloisa Poggio, a young researcher that has published the paper "The Galactic warp revealed by Gaia DR2 kinematics". This paper using Gaia DR2 data reveals that the warp of the Milky Way is a gravitationally induced phenomenon. She was awarded with her prize during the SAIt national meeting that was held in Rome on 16 May 2019.

13/05/2019 Gaia Archive version 2.6

Today a new version of the Gaia Archive is rolled out. A temporary downtime of the Gaia Archive is expected between 10:30 and 12:30 CEST, after which you will be able to enjoy the upgraded performance of our Gaia Archive when retrieving your Gaia data!

25/04/2019 Geographic contributions to DPAC

Today marks the first birthday of our Gaia Data Release 2, a data release that truly changed our view of the Milky Way. We'd like to celebrate this day with a special thank you to all the people involved in all stages of Gaia's life: from initial proposal, to gathering interest, to design and building and actual operating of the spacecraft. From getting the data down, checking the health of the data, to processing the raw data into a scientifically usable format and then validating to make sure the data is truly that great!

In the image released today you can see the geographic contributions to the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. It shows the countries where the people in DPAC are working. Read further on Gaia DPAC and its contribution to Gaia Data Release 2 in our newest story available here.

18/04/2019 Summary of the 53rd ESLAB symposium

From 8-12 April 2019, the 53rd ESLAB symposium took place at ESTEC, The Netherlands. A summary of the results shown at the symposium can be found here.