2025-07-09 Downtime on 17 July 2025 between 10:00-11:00 CEST

9 July 2025

A downtime can be expected on 17 July between 10:00 and 11:00 CEST due to maintenance to the network at ESAC. This means that the Gaia Archive will go down.

For Gaia Collaboration members, please realize that this downtime also affects our wiki, jira, svn and databases which are hosted at ESAC.

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2025-06-26 Data Release 4 expected in December 2026

26 June 2025

Currently the Gaia symposium "Gaia: The (TWO) Billion Star Galaxy Census: Anticipating the Leap in Understanding of Planets, Stars, the Milky Way with Gaia DR4" is ongoing at the European Astronomical Society annual meeting in Cork. It was announced that Gaia Data Release 4 can be expected in December 2026. The slides of the presentations... read more

2025-06-05 New version of the Gaia ESA Archive published

5 June 2025

Version 3.8 of the Gaia ESA Archive has been published yesterday. Whereas this release mostly contains internal upgrades devoted to preparations towards Gaia DR4, there are two attention points (also highlighted in the release notes). More details?

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New transient event class found with Gaia: Extreme Nuclear Transients

3 June 2025

Thanks to Gaia and the Zwicky Transient Facility a new class of transient events was found: Extreme Nuclear Transients or ENTs. The most energetic transient events now known! Current data shows these events are powered by massive stars (with a weight of about 3 to 10 solar masses) being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole (SMBH). While... read more

2025-06-02 Hubble and Gaia revisit fate of our galaxy

2 June 2025

Over a decade’s worth of NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope data was used to re-examine the long-held prediction that the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy in about 4.5 billion years. The astronomers found that, based on the latest observational data from Hubble and Gaia, there is only a 50-50 chance of the two galaxies... read more

Gaia Bulletin #03

22 May 2025

Gaia Bulletin #03 is out now!

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2025-05-13 Gaia DR3 sources with high proper motions

13 May 2025

The fastest stars on the sky, now updated thanks to Gaia. Find the new table in our latest story.

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2025-04-29 Gaia spots odd family of stars desperate to leave home

29 April 2025

Gaia has spotted an unusual family of stars all strangely eager to leave home – a family we couldn’t have discovered without the star-surveying spacecraft, and one unlike all others we have spotted to date. A story on this topic was published... read more

2025-04-16 Birthplace of magnetar investigated thanks to Hubble and Gaia

16 April 2025

Thanks to Hubble and Gaia, the birthplace of the magnetar SGR 0501+4516 was investigated in more detail. It was not born in a neighbouring supernova as previously thought, its birthplace is now unknown. More details here: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Hubble_investigates_a_magnetar_s_birthplace.

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2025-03-28 Gaia: rewriting the story of our Milky Way

28 March 2025

For over a decade, ESA’s Gaia mission has mapped our galaxy with stunning precision—rewriting the story of the Milky Way. As its mission enters a new phase, we look back at its most groundbreaking discoveries so far (based on only 3 years of data) with this... read more

2025-03-27 Gaia passivation

27 March 2025

"The epitaph of Gaia: Stop, traveler, as you pass by. A science jewel was I. Many minds were set on me. Now, I drift as cold debris." Today the Gaia spacecraft was moved into its retirement orbit and passivated. An special day for the Gaia mission operations team and the many people working in the Gaia Collaboration for years on this... read more