paper

Around Gaia Alerts in 20 questions

arXiv:1112.0187 · doi:10.1017/S1743921312001305

Abstract

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 (i.e. positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) for the brightest 1 billion objects in the sky. These data, complemented with multi-band, multi-epoch photometric and spectroscopic data collected 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, e.g. supernovae, novae and microlensing events, GRB afterglows, fallback supernovae, 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 phenomena at optical wavelengths.

Text of the poster presented at the IAU Symposium #285 "New Horizons in Time Domain Astronomy", Oxford, UK, 19-23 September 2011, included in the proceedings Eds. R.E.M. Griffin, R.J. Hanisch & R. Seaman. Original poster is available under this link: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/ioa/wikis/gsawgwiki/images/3/33/AroundGaiaPoster2011.pdf

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