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The first release of Gaia astrometric data

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Hi there! Today is a little bit different, since I will tell you about positions of stars in the sky. WTF??? No Solar System today? Well, actually this is very useful for studying the Solar System. This deals with astrometry, which tells you where your object is.
Another difference with the usual business is that I do not present you a paper, but a series of paper. I have counted 6 papers related to this first release of Gaia data, i.e. the Gaia DR1, for Gaia Data Release 1. They will be published soon in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and some of them are freely available on arXiv. The Gaia Data Release 1 was made available online on Sept, 14th.

Why astrometry?

When you want to study Solar System objects, you need to know where they are, especially if you study their orbital motion, but not only. For that, you use stars as fixed enough reference points, with respect to which you will locate your planetary object of interest. Actually, the stars have some motion with respect to the observer. They have their proper motion, since our galaxy is moving, and a parallax effect, which is a consequence of the motion of the Earth. If you observe something that does not move while you are moving, you will see an apparent motion. This motion will be all the more significant that the object is closer. These problems motivate the use of even further objects, the quasars, with respect to which the stars will be located. These quasars, for quasi-stellar radio-sources, are actually galaxies with an active nucleus. As galaxies, they are further from us than the observed stars, which belong to our galaxy. Moreover, they are brighter, which make them ideal reference points for defining reference frames, in which the stars will be positioned.

One of the goals of the Gaia mission is to elaborate the most accurate and exhaustive catalog giving the positions of stars.

The first space experiment devoted to high precision astrometry was Hipparcos, for High precision parallax collecting satellite. It was made by the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 1989, and has operated until 1993. It could detect light sources until the magnitude 12.5. It resulted in 3 catalogs: Hipparcos, Tycho-1 and Tycho-2.

The Hipparcos catalog was constituted of 118,218 entries, giving astrometric and photometric data for almost all of them. The astrometric data were composed of 6 elements: right ascension and declination, which locate the object on the sky, the parallax, which is related to its distance, the proper motion in right ascension and declination, and its radial velocity, i.e. the time variation of its distance.

A more extensive analysis of the stars detected by Hipparcos resulted in 2 more comprehensive catalogs, Tycho-1 and Tycho-2, constituted of respectively 1,058,332 and 2,539,913 entries. Tycho-2 was the most accurate catalog we disposed on until this first release of Gaia data. It gives astrometric data at the mean date J1991.25.

Gaia is an astrometric satellite made by ESA and launched in December 2013. It orbits close to the Lagrange point L2 of the Sun-Earth system. This means that it lies between the Sun and the Earth, at a distance of 1.5 millions km from the Earth, and that its orbit is very stable, since the gravitational attraction of the Earth balances the one of the Sun, at that place. This pretty limited distance from the Earth allows a high rate of data transmission (40 Gbyte / day). From that place, Gaia makes systematic scans of the sky during its 5-years operational phase, which has started on July 25th 2014. It is composed of 2 telescopes with a very stable angle between them, and the whole sky shall be observed 70 times during the 5-years nominal mission.

Gaia can detect light sources up to the magnitude 20. This will permit the discovery of unknown Solar System objects, like asteroids or comets, but also of exoplanets. The discovery of a supernova, named Gaia14aaa, has been announced in September 2014. Moreover, the accurate determination of the proper motion of the stars shall give us an accurate picture of the motion of our galaxy, and permit a better knowledge of the position of the stars in the past and in the future. This shall help to redetermine astrometric position of Solar System objects on old astrometric planets, and so refine their orbital ephemerides, as proposed by the NAROO (New Astrometric Reduction of Old Observations) project.

The Data Release 1

The Data Release 1 has been released on Sep, 14th 2016. It contains positions of more than one billion of stars brighter than magnitude 20.7, and proper motion and parallaxes of about 2 millions of stars, which are the Tycho-2 objects. These numbers are given at the date J2015.0. The data are based on the first 14 months of the operational phase, and they should be seen as very preliminary results.

This release is of high importance, since it represents a major improvement with respect to the catalog Tycho-2, and shows the efficiency of Gaia. We could thus be very confident in the accuracy of the future releases.

In the future

This Data Release 1 is just the first release. Others will come, in which the astrometric data will be accompanied by photometric data. The Data Release 2 is planned for summer 2017, the releases 3 and 4 for 2018 and 2019 respectively, while the final one should come in 2022. This final release shall also include discoveries of Jupiter-like planets out of our Solar System.

At the end, Gaia shall have an astrometric accuracy of 25 micro-arcseconds at the magnitude 15, while Hipparcos reached 1 milli-arcsecond. Reaching such an accuracy is a challenge. For that, the timing must be extremely precise, and second-order relativistic effect of the deviation of the light by the Earth and other object must be considered.

Regarding the parallaxes, i.e. the distance: Hipparcos has given us the parallaxes of 60,000 objects with an accuracy of 20%, while the Gaia Data Release 1 gives us the same information, with the same accuracy, for 1 million objects. The Final Release shall give us 10 millions of parallaxes with an accuracy of 1%, 150 millions of them with an accuracy of 10%, 280 millions of them with an accuracy of 20%. Knowing the distances of stars with such a precision will permit major improvements in the understanding of star clusters and in the structure of the Milky Way.

 

Some links

 

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