Estimating Distance from Parallaxes. IV. Distances to 1.33 Billion Stars in Gaia Data Release 2

By Coryn A. L. Bailer-Jones, J. Rybizki, Morgan Fouesneau, G. Mantelet, R. Andrae. Astronomical Journal, 2018

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For the vast majority of stars in the second Gaia data release, reliable distances cannot be obtained by inverting the parallax. A correct inference procedure must instead be used to account for the nonlinearity of the transformation and the asymmetry of the resulting probability distribution. Here, we infer distances to essentially all 1.33 billion stars with parallaxes published in the second Gaia data release. This is done using a weak distance prior that varies smoothly as a function of Galactic longitude and latitude according to a Galaxy model. The irreducible uncertainty in the distance estimate is characterized by the lower and upper bounds of an asymmetric confidence interval. Although more precise distances can be estimated for a subset of the stars using additional data (such as photometry), our goal is to provide purely geometric distance estimates, independent of assumptions about the physical properties of, or interstellar extinction toward, individual stars. We analyze the characteristics of the catalog and validate it using clusters. The catalog can be queried using ADQL at http://gaia.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/tap.html (which also hosts the Gaia catalog) and downloaded from http://www.mpia.de/~calj/gdr2_distances.html.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/89537cf83ab529ff9a2312218f88ac86680d7189

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Citations in the corpus

Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Pulsating Variable Stars, Rotation, Convective Boundaries, and Energy Conservation (2019, background): “…billion stars, begins the process of converting the spectrophotometric measurements to distances, proper motions, luminosities, effective temperatures, surface gravities, and elemental compositions (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2018a; Bailer-Jones et al. 2018; Lindegren et al. 2018; Luri et al. 2018).”
The Revised TESS Input Catalog and Candidate Target List (2019, methodology): “For the absolute magnitude calculations, distances were taken from Bailer-Jones et al. (2018).”
A Gaia DR2 view of the open cluster population in the Milky Way (2018, methodology): “…smaller than ∼0.2 mas would be better constrained by a Bayesian approach using priors based on an assumed density distribution of the Milky Way (as in e.g. Bailer-Jones et al. 2018) or photometric considerations (e.g. Anderson et al. 2018), or simply with more classical isochrone fitting methods.”
On the Spectral Evolution of Hot White Dwarf Stars. I. A Detailed Model Atmosphere Analysis of Hot White Dwarfs from SDSS DR12 (2020, methodology): “We obtained distance estimates by simply inverting the parallaxes as this procedure agrees well with more sophisticated probabilistic methods for small parallax uncertainties (Bailer-Jones 2015; Bailer-Jones et al. 2018).”
Photo-astrometric distances, extinctions, and astrophysical parameters for Gaia DR2 stars brighter than G = 18 (2019, methodology): “Figures 20 and 21 show a comparison of the StarHorse results for AG extinction and effective temperature, respectively, in a similar fashion as for the comparison to the Bailer-Jones et al. (2018) distances in the Fig.”
LISA verification binaries with updated distances from Gaia Data Release 2 (2018, methodology): “To estimate distances from the measured parallaxes a probability-based inference approach is required (e.g. Bailer-Jones 2015; Igoshev et al. 2016; Astraatmadja & Bailer-Jones 2016; Bailer-Jones et al. 2018; Luri et al. 2018).”
The Eighteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: Targeting and First Spectra from SDSS-V (2023, methodology): “- > - -( ( )) ( )FUV r FUV NUV5 log 10 14 46;10 est 2. rest< 300 pc. Data sources: Bailer-Jones et al. (2018) distance catalog (rest), GALEX (FUV, NUV).”
Age determination for 269 Gaia DR2 open clusters (2019, methodology): “As discussed by Luri et al. (2018), such determination of distance is a very poor approximation, since systematics and correlations in the Gaia astrometric solution tend to overestimate the true distance, that should instead be obtained by Bayesian inferences (see, e.g., Bailer-Jones et al. 2018).”
Kinematics in Young Star Clusters and Associations with Gaia DR2 (2018, background): “Parallaxes Distances to stellar systems can be estimated with the assumption that their members span a small range of distances (cf. Bailer-Jones et al. 2018, their Section 3.5).”
SOAR TESS Survey. I. Sculpting of TESS Planetary Systems by Stellar Companions (2019, methodology): “We collect distances to each of these targets from Gaia DR2 (Bailer-Jones et al. 2018), when available.”
The Fifteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release of MaNGA-derived Quantities, Data Visualization Tools, and Stellar Library (2018, methodology): “The absolute magnitudes are derived using parallax-based distance estimates from Bailer-Jones et al. (2018).”
Cyclotron lines in highly magnetized neutron stars (2018, background): “The distance to A 0535+26 is ∼2 kpc (Giangrande et al. 1980; Steele et al. 1998), which has been recently confirmed by Gaia (Bailer-Jones et al. 2018).”