Analysis and knowledge discovery by means of self-organizing maps for gaia data releases

Abstract

A billion stars: this is the approximate amount of visible objects estimated to be observed by the Gaia satellite, representing roughly 1% of the objects in the Galaxy. It constitutes the biggest amount of data gathered to date: by the end of the mission, the data archive will exceed 1 Petabyte. Now, in order to process this data, the Gaia mission conceived the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, which will apply data mining techniques such as Self-Organizing Maps. This paper shows a useful technique for source clustering, focusing on the development of an advanced visualization tool based on this technique.