Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Populations

Tuesday, 19 September 2017, 14:00   (HS5)

The Gaia Mission - Overview, First Results, and future prospects

Stefan Jordan^1
1Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, ZAH, Universität Heidelberg, Germany

The astrometric satellite Gaia was launched in December 2019. After a comprehensive commissioning phase Gaia began its nominal scientific measurements in mid 2014. Gaia’s main goal is the determination of precise astrometric data for more than one billion stars in our Milky Way with extremely high precision. Gaia Data Release 1 was published in September 2016. It contains positions and magnitudes for about 1.1 billion stars. For two million stars proper motions and parallaxes could also be determined. More than 160 scientific papers based on this catalogue were published until July 2017. Gaia Data Release 2 will be available in April 2018 and will probably contain more than one billion stars with positions, proper motions and parallaxes, many having a precision of better than 0.1 milliarcsecond.