The Gaia mission and variable stars

TL;DR

The Gaia mission will revolutionize the study of variable stars by providing comprehensive, multi-epoch data for millions of objects, enabling detailed statistical and individual analyses.

Contribution

This paper describes Gaia's capabilities for variable star detection and analysis, highlighting the role of DPAC CU7 in processing variability data.

Findings

Expected detection of tens of millions of variable objects

Enables statistical studies of variable star populations

Supports identification of interesting candidates for follow-up

Abstract

The Gaia satellite, to be launched in 2012, will offer an unprecedented survey of the whole sky down to magnitude 20. The multi-epoch nature of the mission provides a unique opportunity to study variable sources with their astrometric, photometric, spectro-photometric and radial velocity measurements. Many tens of millions of classical variable objects are expected to be detected, mostly stars but also QSOs and asteroids. The high number of objects observed by Gaia will enable statistical studies of populations of variable sources and of their properties. But Gaia will also allow the study of individual objects to some depth depending on their variability types, and the identification of potentially interesting candidates that would benefit from further ground based observations by the scientific community. Within the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), which is subdivided into 9 Coordination Units (CU), one (CU7) is dedicated to the variability analysis. Its goal is to provide information on variable sources for the Gaia intermediate and final catalogue releases.