Around gaia alerts in 20 questions

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 (positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) for the 1 billion brightest objects in the sky. Those data, complemented with multi-band, multi-epoch photometric and spectroscopic data observed 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 such as supernovæ, novæ and microlensing events, GRB afterglows, fallback supernovæ, 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 pheonomena at optical wavelengths. © 2012 International Astronomical Union.