Search Publications
The Gaia mission
Prusti, T.; Mazeh, T.; Zucker, S. +623 more
Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the EuropeanSpace Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to a direct-imaging approach. Both the spacecraft and the payload were built by European industry. The involvement of the scientific …
Gaia Data Release 1. Summary of the astrometric, photometric, and survey properties
Prusti, T.; Mazeh, T.; Zucker, S. +589 more
Context. At about 1000 days after the launch of Gaia we present the first Gaia data release, Gaia DR1, consisting of astrometry and photometry for over 1 billion sources brighter than magnitude 20.7.
Aims: A summary of Gaia DR1 is presented along with illustrations of the scientific quality of the data, followed by a discussion of the limitat…
Gaia Data Release 1. Astrometry: one billion positions, two million proper motions and parallaxes
Mora, A.; Jordan, S.; Figueras, F. +80 more
Context. Gaia Data Release 1 (DR1) contains astrometric results for more than 1 billion stars brighter than magnitude 20.7 based on observations collected by the Gaia satellite during the first 14 months of its operational phase.
Aims: We give a brief overview of the astrometric content of the data release and of the model assumptions, data p…
Gaia Data Release 1. Pre-processing and source list creation
Mora, A.; Boudreault, S.; Jordan, S. +104 more
Context. The first data release from the Gaia mission contains accurate positions and magnitudes for more than a billion sources, and proper motions and parallaxes for the majority of the 2.5 million Hipparcos and Tycho-2 stars.
Aims: We describe three essential elements of the initial data treatment leading to this catalogue: the image analy…
Gaia Data Release 1. Reference frame and optical properties of ICRF sources
Holl, B.; Biermann, M.; Hutton, A. +18 more
Context. As part of the data processing for Gaia Data Release 1 (Gaia DR1) a special astrometric solution was computed, the so-called auxiliary quasar solution. This gives positions for selected extragalactic objects, including radio sources in the second realisation of the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF2) that have optical counterp…
Gaia Data Release 1. The Cepheid and RR Lyrae star pipeline and its application to the south ecliptic pole region
Szabados, L.; Rimoldini, L.; Holl, B. +24 more
Context. The European Space Agency spacecraft Gaia is expected to observe about 10 000 Galactic Cepheids and over 100 000 Milky Way RR Lyrae stars (a large fraction of which will be new discoveries), during the five-year nominal lifetime spent scanning the whole sky to a faint limit of G = 20.7 mag, sampling their light variation on average about …
Stellar parametrization from Gaia RVS spectra
Allende Prieto, C.; Recio-Blanco, A.; de Laverny, P. +7 more
Context. Among the myriad of data collected by the ESA Gaia satellite, about 150 million spectra will be delivered by the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) for stars as faint as GRVS~ 16. A specific stellar parametrization will be performed on most of these RVS spectra, I.e. those with enough high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), which sho…
Gaia Data Release 1. Principles of the photometric calibration of the G band
Jordi, C.; Balaguer-Núñez, L.; Evans, D. W. +24 more
Context. Gaia is an ESA cornerstone mission launched on 19 December 2013 aiming to obtain the most complete and precise 3D map of our Galaxy by observing more than one billion sources. This paper is part of a series of documents explaining the data processing and its results for Gaia Data Release 1, focussing on the G band photometry.
Aims: T…
Gaia FGK benchmark stars: new candidates at low metallicities
Gilmore, G.; Randich, S.; Soubiran, C. +10 more
Context. We have entered an era of large spectroscopic surveys in which we can measure, through automated pipelines, the atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances for large numbers of stars. Calibrating these survey pipelines using a set of "benchmark stars" in order to evaluate the accuracy and precision of the provided parameters and abunda…
Asteroseismic versus Gaia distances: A first comparison
De Ridder, J.; Eyer, L.; Aerts, C. +1 more
Context. The Kepler space mission led to a large number of high-precision time series of solar-like oscillators. Using a Bayesian analysis that combines asteroseismic techniques and additional ground-based observations, the mass, radius, luminosity, and distance of these stars can be estimated with good precision. This has given a new impetus to t…