Today we have news of a torrential downpour of data from the Gaia mission. This amazing mission has just posted an early version of its data release 3 catalog. The finalized version will come out in spring 2022, but this interim release has enough content to keep everyone busy until then.

This release contains:

• 1.8 billion stellar positions
• 1.5 billion stellar colors
• 1.5 billion stellar parallax and proper motion measurements
• 1.6 million extragalactic sources

This kind of data allows us to precisely answer questions about where we are, what is around us, and where all of it is going over time.

Over the next few weeks, we expect a deluge of papers. One of my favorite phenomena with Gaia data is the automated paper. There are folks out there who know that specific questions can be answered with the data and have their software ready to mine the data, find the results, and essentially plug the results into a pre-written paper using software that has “if this value, then this paragraph” coded in.

Already there is cool science being written. For instance, this data precisely measures our solar system’s motion in relation to distant quasars, and using this data, researchers could calculate the acceleration our solar system experiences from the gravity of our galaxy – this is the F=ma acceleration that determines our orbit. The number is small – just two one-hundred-billionth parts of the gravitational acceleration caused by the Earth on its surface – but it is the kind of data that allows other research to be done.

Stay tuned, the data has arrived and the science will follow.

More Information

ESA press release 

DLR press release 

University of Helsinki press release 

Gaia Early Data Release 3