2023-11-16 Two traineeship positions available in the Gaia mission

ESA's 2024 trainee positions have been published now, with two of them in the Gaia mission. The first one is at ESTEC in the Netherlands with the topic: "A Gaia view of the constellations across time" which aims to explore the evolution of the constellations, which is not visually susceptible over the lifetime of humans and hence not easy to grasp. Use will be made of Gaia's data to visualise, in a scientifically accurate way, the stellar content of arbitrary constellations at arbitrary moments in time, up to (dozens or hundreds of) millennia in the past or future. More details on this position can be found here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/esac-trainees/a-gaia-view-of-the-constellations-across-time.

The second topic is on periodicity in billions of Gaia astrometric time series and would be supervised from ESAC in Spain. Gaia's fourth data release (GDR4) will contain series of highly-accurate positional measurements for more than 2 billion astronomical sources. These astrometric timeseries carry a wealth of information of astrophysical and technical nature, but only a small fraction are searched for periodic patterns beyond parallax by the Gaia data processing pipelines. The goal of this project is to enable the source-specific discovery of periodic astrometric signals across the entire GDR4 dataset, which will make it possible to discover and study phenomena related to binary stars, black holes, exoplanets, instrumental effects, survey artefacts, and much more.  More details on this internship can be found here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/esac-trainees/periodicity-in-billions-of-gaia-astrometric-timeseries.