ESA Gaia Science Community - Gaia

Science with 1 billion objects in three dimensions

Welcome to ESA's website for the Gaia Scientific Community

Gaia news & highlights

2022-11-25 100 months of Gaia data

25 November 2022The Gaia science operations started on the 25th of July 2014, when the spacecraft was turned on in science mode, following the completion of the in-flight commissioning. This 25 November 2022 marks the 100 months of data collection, with a regular daily flow of an average of 70 million new on-board detections and a single significant...

2022-11-23 The astonishment

23 November 2022The Gaia mission has many scientific goals: to increase our understanding of the Milky Way, to create the best map so far of our galaxy, and more. But one important aspect of science missions in general is to inspire. Inspiration can lead to the greatest discoveries and the most beautiful ideas spring to mind. One such project, called "Gen...

2022-11-17 Gaia Photometric Science Alerts at risk

17 November 2022The Gaia Photometric Science Alerts consists of a pipeline feeding candidate transients into a web portal. This allows the community to follow up on potentially interesting events seen by Gaia immediately following observations taken. Currently, these Gaia Alerts are at risk due to a combination of factors. More info can be found from the news...

2022-11-09 Gaia Collaboration to receive 2023 Berkeley Prize

9 November 2022The Gaia collaboration is being honored with the 2023 Lancelot M. Berkeley − New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy for enabling a transformative, multidimensional map of the Milky Way. Since its launch in 2013, the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope has recorded stellar positions, distances, colors, and...

2022-11-09 Gamma-Ray Burst detection from L2 by Gaia

9 November 2022Gaia is the European Space Agency's astrometric mission to map the Milky Way galaxy in unprecedented detail. The spacecraft has no dedicated particle detection instrumentation but is however able to measure the particle flux at the focal plane by counting the ionization tracks due to the passage of charged particles. On 9 October 2022 an...

2022-11-08 Internship positions with the Gaia mission

8 November 2022The 2023 internship opportunities at ESA have been published. Among them, three internship positions with the Gaia mission opened up: Internship in the Science and Operations Department at ESTEC (Noordwijk, The Netherlands) on science communication and visualisation (See the first opportunity mentioned there) Internship in the Science...

2022-11-04 Gaia's first black hole discovery: Gaia-BH1

4 November 2022As was already hinted at in one of the papers of the Gaia Collaboration "Gaia Data Release 3: Stellar multiplicity, a teaser for the hidden treasure", the Gaia mission is expected to find dark companions of stars, like dormant black holes or dormant neutron stars. Since Gaia's data release 3 and more specifically the release of the multi-star...

2022-10-26 Are Newton and Einstein in error after all?

26 October 2022Star clusters continually loose their stars until nothing is left of them. If the standard law of gravitation is correct, then the same number of stars leave their star cluster through its front and through its back, as the cluster moves about the Milky Way. Observations acquired now, however, show many more stars in the front of the five...