Gaia Data Release 1: Astrometry - one billion positions, two million proper motions and parallaxes

By L. Lindegren, U. Lammers, U. Bastian, J. Hern'andez, S. Klioner, D. Hobbs, A. Bombrun, D. Michalik, M. Ramos-Lerate, A. Butkevich and 73 more. 2016

533 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gaia Data Release 1 (Gaia 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. We give a brief overview of the astrometric content of the data release and of the model assumptions, data processing, and validation of the results. For stars in common with the Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues, complete astrometric single-star solutions are obtained by incorporating positional information from the earlier catalogues. For other stars only their positions are obtained by neglecting their proper motions and parallaxes. The results are validated by an analysis of the residuals, through special validation runs, and by comparison with external data. Results. For about two million of the brighter stars (down to magnitude ~11.5) we obtain positions, parallaxes, and proper motions to Hipparcos-type precision or better. For these stars, systematic errors depending e.g. on position and colour are at a level of 0.3 milliarcsecond (mas). For the remaining stars we obtain positions at epoch J2015.0 accurate to ~10 mas. Positions and proper motions are given in a reference frame that is aligned with the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) to better than 0.1 mas at epoch J2015.0, and non-rotating with respect to ICRF to within 0.03 mas/yr. The Hipparcos reference frame is found to rotate with respect to the Gaia DR1 frame at a rate of 0.24 mas/yr. Based on less than a quarter of the nominal mission length and on very provisional and incomplete calibrations, the quality and completeness of the astrometric data in Gaia DR1 are far from what is expected for the final mission products. The results nevertheless represent a huge improvement in the available fundamental stellar data and practical definition of the optical reference frame.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1615e7e0ca78a165b6a7316a9e447f86320307fe

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Huber
2. Timothy Morton
3. E. Petigura
4. B. Fulton
5. Hans-Walter Rix
6. J. Owen
7. Andrew W. Howard
8. J. Johnson

In Computational Mechanics

1. D. Huber
2. D. Stello
3. T. Bedding
4. S. Mathur
5. W. Chaplin
6. R. García
7. Timothy Morton
8. J. Johnson

In Instrumentation

1. D. Huber
2. Timothy Morton
3. E. Petigura
4. B. Fulton
5. J. Johnson
6. Andrew W. Howard
7. J. Owen
8. G. Marcy

Citations in the corpus

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• The Hipparcos–Gaia Catalog of Accelerations (2018, methodology): “Of the 118,218 stars in the Hipparcos catalog (ESA 1997), just 83,034 are present in the Hipparcos-DR2 best neighbor catalog available on the Gaia archive (Marrese et al. 2018), and 93,635 are present in TGAS (Michalik et al. 2015; Lindegren et al. 2016).”
• New Parallaxes of Galactic Cepheids from Spatially Scanning the Hubble Space Telescope: Implications for the Hubble Constant (2018, methodology): “Thus, a robust solution requires more than seven reference stars with high S/Ns in both scans, not saturated in the deep scan, running most of the scan length, and not crossing another star trail.”
• The California-Kepler Survey. II. Precise Physical Properties of 2025 Kepler Planets and Their Host Stars (2017, methodology): “…parameters and uncertainties, we performed an additional assessment of the quality of the derived CKS stellar radii using trigonometric parallaxes, ,trigp , from the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS; Michalik et al. 2015; Gaia Collaboration et al. 2016a, 2016b; Lindegren et al. 2016).”
• Gaia Data Release 2 (2018, background): “As explained in more detail in Lindegren et al. (2016) and Lindegren et al. (2012), this basic model of the source motion on the sky describes the time-dependent coordinate direction from the observer towards an object outside the solar system as the unit vector u(t) = 〈r + (tB − tep)(pµα∗ + qµδ +…”
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• The GALAH Survey: Second Data Release (2018, background): “The ESA Gaia astrometric mission will measure accurate distances for billions of stars belonging to most components of the Galaxy (Perryman et al. 2001; Lindegren et al. 2016).”