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Around Gaia Alerts in 20 questions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2012

Łukasz Wyrzykowski  and
Simon Hodgkin
Łukasz Wyrzykowski
Affiliation:
Institute of Astronomy, The Observatories, Cambridge, CB3 0HA, UK email: wyrzykow@ast.cam.ac.uk, sth@ast.cam.ac.uk Warsaw University Astronomical Observatory, 00-478 Warszawa, Poland email: lw@astrouw.edu.pl
Simon Hodgkin
Affiliation:
Institute of Astronomy, The Observatories, Cambridge, CB3 0HA, UK email: wyrzykow@ast.cam.ac.uk, sth@ast.cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

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Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) astrometry space mission, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. Gaia's main goal is to collect high-precision astrometric data (positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) for the 1 billion brightest objects in the sky. Those data, complemented with multi-band, multi-epoch photometric and spectroscopic data observed from the same observing platform, will allow astronomers to reconstruct the formation history, structure, and evolution of the Galaxy.

Gaia will observe the whole sky for 5 years, providing a unique opportunity for the discovery of large numbers of transient and anomalous events such as supernovæ, novæ and microlensing events, GRB afterglows, fallback supernovæ, and other theoretical or unexpected phenomena. The Photometric Science Alerts team has been tasked with the early detection, classification and prompt release of anomalous sources in the Gaia data stream. In this paper we discuss the challenges we face in preparing to use Gaia to search for transient pheonomena at optical wavelengths.

Keywords

space missions: Gaiasupernovae: generalgravitational lensingnovae
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 7 , Symposium S285: New Horizons in Time-Domain Astronomy , September 2011 , pp. 425 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2012

References

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