24th April 2024 –18:15h CEST
Gaia is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) major astrometry mission. I will briefly introduce the Gaia mission and its technical challenges, and present some of the scientific findings on the evolution of the Milky Way, astrophysics and other highlights made possible by Gaia.
Over the past almost ten years, Gaia has taken more than 2.4 trillion astrometric and almost half a trillion photometric measurements and recorded almost 50 billion spectra. In June 2022, the third Gaia catalogue was published, making positions, proper motions, parallaxes and many other stellar parameters available to both scientists and the public with unprecedented accuracy for more than 1.8 billion stars.
This Gaia catalogue and its successors will revolutionize astronomy, in virtually every field of research! Despite its enormous size, including nearly 1.5 billion parallaxes, 35 million radial velocities, 11 million variable stars, 800,000 binary stars, 160,000 solar system objects, and much more, the third Gaia catalogue is still only preliminary.
