Gaia Data Release 3. Catalogue validation

By M. Cropper, D. Katz, P. Sartoretti, T. Prusti, J. Bruijne, F. Chassat, P. Charvet, J. Boyadijan, M. Perryman, G. Sarri and 33 more. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2022

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The third gaia data release (DR3) provides a wealth of new data products. The early part of the release, Gaia EDR3, already provided the astrometric and photometric data for nearly two billion sources. The full release now adds improved parameters compared to Gaia DR2 for radial velocities, astrophysical parameters, variability information, light curves, and orbits for Solar System objects. The improvements are in terms of the number of sources, the variety of parameter information, precision, and accuracy. For the first time, Gaia DR3 also provides a sample of spectrophotometry and spectra obtained with the Radial Velocity Spectrometer, binary star solutions, and a characterisation of extragalactic object candidates. Before the publication of the catalogue, these data have undergone a dedicated transversal validation process. The aim of this paper is to highlight limitations of the data that were found during this process and to provide recommendations for the usage of the catalogue. The validation was obtained through a statistical analysis of the data, a confirmation of the internal consistency of different products, and a comparison of the values to external data or models. Gaia DR3 is a new major step forward in terms of the number, diversity, precision, and accuracy of the Gaia products. As always in such a large and complex catalogue, however, issues and limitations have also been found. Detailed examples of the scientific quality of the Gaia DR3 release can be found in the accompanying data-processing papers as well as in the performance verification papers. Here we focus only on the caveats that the user should be aware of to scientifically exploit the data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6fb09ff7e367b55b25a0f02a28ba7bd1e06bbb1e

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Citations in the corpus

Unresolved stellar companions with Gaia DR2 astrometry (2020, methodology): “The RR Lyrae stars have been selected joining the objects classified as RR Lyrae in the Gaia SOS (Specific Object Studies, see Clementini et al. 2019) and general variability (see Holl et al. 2018) tables.”
Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters (2020, methodology): “Soubiran et al. (2018) have obtained mean radial velocities for several hundreds of clusters using the Gaia Radial Velocity Spectrometer (Cropper et al. 2018) and shown a smooth increase in vertical velocity dispersion with age.”
APOGEE Data and Spectral Analysis from SDSS Data Release 16: Seven Years of Observations Including First Results from APOGEE-South (2020, unknown): “However, the Gaia DR2 RVs (Cropper et al. 2018; Sartoretti et al. 2018; Katz et al. 2019) are in better agreement with the DR16 APOGEE values than the DR14 APOGEE values.”