The latest data release from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission is sparking a frenzy of exciting new astrophysics research
On June 13, at 6 A.M. ET, astronomers around the world descended on the Gaia Archive: the landing Web page for every last bit of data from the European Space Agency’s Milky Way–mapping Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics mission. After years of calibrating and validating the spacecraft’s measurements of the motion, speed, brightness, composition and other properties of hundreds of millions of stars, mission officials finally unveiled Data Release 3 to the public.
Drimmel spent a couple of months before the release double-checking some of Gaia’s observations—just long enough to pull together a paper, one of the many papers the DPAC team wrote to demonstrate what is possible with DR3.
“We’re all excited about the black holes; everyone’s champing to find the black hole,” says Katie Breivik, an astronomer at the CCA. Combing through the enormous new catalog of binary systems in DR3 in the days after the release, though, “we were like, ‘Really? There’s nothing? There’s not one single gigantic black hole screaming at us?’ But that’s okay. Our hopes are not dashed yet.”
But it isn’t just star lovers who are excited about spectra. DR3 also contains spectra for around 60,000 asteroids. Investigators such as Federica Spoto of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics can use these spectra to learn what distant asteroids are made of and find composition-based “families” to help link scattered space rocks to the original objects they splintered from.
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