Gaia Data Release 3: The Galaxy in your preferred colours. Synthetic photometry from Gaia low-resolution spectra

Abstract

Gaia Data Release 3 provides novel flux-calibrated low-resolution spectrophotometry for about 220 million sources in the wavelength range 330nm - 1050nm (XP spectra). Synthetic photometry directly tied to a flux in physical units can be obtained from these spectra for any passband fully enclosed in this wavelength range. We describe how synthetic photometry can be obtained from XP spectra, illustrating the performance that can be achieved under a range of different conditions - for example passband width and wavelength range - as well as the limits and the problems affecting it. Existing top-quality photometry can be reproduced within a few per cent over a wide range of magnitudes and colour, for wide and medium bands, and with up to millimag accuracy when synthetic photometry is standardised with respect to these external sources. Some examples of potential scientific application are presented, including the detection of multiple populations in globular clusters, the estimation of metallicity extended to the very metal-poor regime, and the classification of white dwarfs. A catalogue providing standardised photometry for ~220 million sources in several wide bands of widely used photometric systems is provided (Gaia Synthetic Photometry Catalogue; GSPC) as well as a catalogue of $\simeq 10^5$ white dwarfs with DA/non-DA classification obtained with a Random Forest algorithm (Gaia Synthetic Photometry Catalogue for White Dwarfs; GSPC-WD).

Accepted for publication by A&A. Gaia DR3 performance verification paper. Latex, 59 pages, 62 figures, 9 appendices. New version with a Note added in proof concerning an error in the standardised y_PS1 fluxes and magnitudes provided in the GSPC

References in corpus (47)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The Gaia mission
• Gaia Data Release 3: Summary of the content and survey properties
• Estimating distances from parallaxes. V: Geometric and photogeometric distances to 1.47 billion stars in Gaia Early Data Release 3
• Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters
• Gaia EDR3 view on Galactic globular clusters
• A catalogue of white dwarfs in Gaia EDR3
• SDSS Standard Star Catalog for Stripe 82: the Dawn of Industrial 1% Optical Photometry
• The Zwicky Transient Facility Catalog of Periodic Variable Stars
• What is a globular cluster? An observational perspective
• Age determination for 269 $Gaia$ DR2 Open Clusters
• The VST Photometric Halpha Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+)
• Gaia Data Release 3: Analysis of RVS spectra using the General Stellar Parametriser from spectroscopy
• SkyMapper Southern Survey: Second Data Release (DR2)
• Gaia Data Release 3: Astrophysical parameters inference system (Apsis) I -- methods and content overview
• Gaia Data Release 3: Processing and validation of BP/RP low-resolution spectral data
• Gaia Data Release 3: Analysis of the Gaia BP/RP spectra using the General Stellar Parameterizer from Photometry
• Gaia Data Release 3: External calibration of BP/RP low-resolution spectroscopic data
• Gaia Data Release 3: Apsis II -- Stellar Parameters
• YBC, a stellar bolometric corrections database with variable extinction coefficients: an application to PARSEC isochrones
• Nitrogen abundances in giant stars of the globular cluster NGC 6752
• Homogeneous photometry VII. Globular clusters in the Gaia era
• The Hubble Space Telescope UV Legacy Survey of Galactic Globular Clusters. II. The seven stellar populations of NGC7089 (M2)
• Internal calibration of Gaia BP/RP low-resolution spectra
• Toward 1% Photometry: End-to-end Calibration of Astronomical Telescopes and Detectors
• Gaia Data Release 3: The extragalactic content
• Survey of Surveys I: The largest catalogue of radial velocities for the Galaxy
• Stroemgren photometry of Galactic Globular Clusters. I. New Calibrations of the metallicity index
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: double, triple and quadruple-line spectroscopic binary candidates
• Searching for Chemical Signatures of Multiple Stellar Populations in the Old, Massive Open Cluster NGC 6791
• Beyond spectroscopy. I. Metallicities, distances, and age estimates for over twenty million stars from SMSS DR2 and Gaia EDR3
• Milky Way Tomography with the SkyMapper Southern Survey. II. Photometric Re-calibration of SMSS DR2
• The Gaia EDR3 view of Johnson-Kron-Cousins standard stars: the curated Landolt and Stetson collections
• J-PLUS: Spectral evolution of white dwarfs by PDF analysis
• Stellar Population Astrophysics (SPA) with TNG Atmospheric parameters of members of 16 unstudied open clusters
• Spectroscopic membership for the populous 300 Myr-old open cluster NGC 3532
• Photometric Cross-Calibration of the SDSS Stripe 82 Standard Stars catalogue with Gaia EDR3, and Comparison with Pan-STARRS1, DES, CFIS and GALEX catalogues
• Validation and Improvement of the Pan-STARRS Photometric Calibration with the Stellar Color Regression Method
• The Gaia spectrophotometric standard stars survey -- V. Preliminary flux tables for the calibration of Gaia DR2 and (E)DR3
• Photometric recalibration of the SDSS Stripe 82 to a few milimagnitude precision with the stellar color regression method and Gaia EDR3
• M13 multiple stellar populations seen with the eyes of Strömgren photometry
• The Gaia spectrophotometric standard stars survey -- IV. Results of the absolute photometry campaign
• Metallicity estimates of young clusters in the Magellanic Clouds from Stromgren photometry of supergiant stars
• The HST Large Programme on NGC 6752. III. Detection of the Peak of the White Dwarf Luminosity Function
• Estimating $\left[\alpha /\text{Fe}\right]$ from Gaia low-resolution BP/RP spectra using the ExtraTrees algorithm
• The GALAH survey: Multiple stars and our Galaxy. I. A comprehensive method for deriving properties of FGK binary stars
• Double-lined spectroscopic binaries in the APOGEE DR16 and DR17 data

Cited by in corpus (27)

• The CosmoVerse White Paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics
• Orbital Period Change of Dimorphos Due to the DART Kinetic Impact
• The spectral evolution of white dwarfs: where do we stand?
• Wide post-common envelope binaries from Gaia: orbit validation and formation models
• An all-sky 3D dust map Based on Gaia and LAMOST
• Enrichment by Extragalactic First Stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Using the Gaia excess uncertainty as a proxy for stellar variability and age
• Candidate Members of the VMP/EMP Disk System of the Galaxy from the SkyMapper and SAGES Surveys
• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Data Preview 1
• Closing the stellar labels gap: Stellar label independent evidence for [$\alpha /M$] information in Gaia BP/RP spectra
• Ba Enrichment in Gaia MS+WD Binaries: Tracing $s$-Process Element Production
• High mass function ellipsoidal variables in the Gaia Focused Product Release: searching for black hole candidates in the binary zoo
• SN 2024bfu, SN 2025qe, and the early light curves of type Iax supernovae
• Calibrating and standardizing the Tip of the Red Giant Branch in the Small Magellanic Cloud using small-amplitude red giants
• Detection of [C I] Emission in Nebular Spectra of a Peculiar Type Ia Supernova 2022pul
• A Method to Measure Photometries of Moderately-Saturated UVOT Sources
• Comparing the Photometric Calibration of DESI Imaging and Gaia Synthetic Photometry
• The miniJPAS survey: White dwarf science with 56 optical filters
• Photometric Catalogue for Space and Ground Night-Time Remote-Sensing Calibration: RGB Synthetic Photometry from Gaia DR3 Spectrophotometry
• Full abundance study of two newly discovered barium giants
• Period-Luminosity-Metallicity-Color Relations of Late-type Contact Binaries in the Big Data Era
• Discovery of a compact hierarchical triple main-sequence star system while searching for binary stars with compact objects
• Recalibration of SDSS photometric zero-points based on the InfraRed Flux Method temperature scale
• Revealing the Binarity of HD 36030 -- One of the Hottest Flare Stars
• BSN-VII: Photometric Light Curve Study of Three Cool, Large-Amplitude, Low Mass, W-Subtype Contact Binaries
• The Stellar Abundances and Galactic Evolution Survey (SAGES). V. The First Data Release of the DDO51 Band
• Time Evolution of Optical Darkness in GRB Afterglow: The Case of GRB 240825A