Pulsating star research and the Gaia revolution

Abstract

In this article we present an overview of the ESA Gaia mission and of the unprecedented impact that Gaia will have on the field of variable star research. We summarise the contents and impact of the first Gaia data release on the description of variability phenomena, with particular emphasis on pulsating star research. The Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution, although limited to 2.1 million stars, has been used in many studies related to pulsating stars. Furthermore a set of 3,194 Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars with their times series have been released. Finally we present the plans for the ongoing study of variable phenomena with Gaia and highlight some of the possible impacts of the second data release on variable, and specifically, pulsating stars.

12 pages, 4 figures, proceedings for the 22nd Los Alamos Stellar Pulsation Conference Series Meeting "Wide field variability surveys: a 21st-century perspective", held in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, Nov. 28 - Dec. 2, 2016

References in corpus (13)

• The Gaia mission
• Gaia Data Release 1. Summary of the astrometric, photometric, and survey properties
• Gaia Data Release 1: Astrometry - one billion positions, two million proper motions and parallaxes
• The Catalina Surveys Periodic Variable Star Catalog
• Standing on the shoulders of Dwarfs: the Kepler asteroseismic LEGACY sample II - radii, masses, and ages
• APOGEE: The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment
• Discovery of $\sim$ 9,000 new RR Lyrae in the Southern Catalina Surveys
• Evidence for a systematic offset of $-$0.25 mas in the Gaia DR1 parallaxes
• Gaia Data Release 1 - The Cepheid & RR Lyrae star pipeline and its application to the south ecliptic pole region
• Variable stars across the observational HR diagram
• A test of Gaia Data Release 1 parallaxes: implications for the local distance scale
• Asteroseismic versus Gaia distances: a first comparison
• Using red clump stars to correct the Gaia DR1 parallaxes