Photometric Science Alerts from Gaia
Lukasz Wyrzykowski, Simon Hodgkin, Nadejda Blogorodnova, Sergey, Koposov, Ross Burgon

TL;DR
Gaia's Photometric Science Alerts system will detect and classify astronomical transients like supernovae and microlensing events in near-real-time, enabling rapid follow-up observations and advancing our understanding of transient phenomena.
Contribution
This paper details Gaia's alert system operation, its scientific potential, and invites collaboration for ground-based follow-up during early mission phases.
Findings
Expected detection of about 6000 supernovae
Identification of approximately 1000 microlensing events
Robust classification with low false-alert rate
Abstract
Gaia is the cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency. From late 2013 it will start collecting superb astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic data for around a billion of stars of our Galaxy. While surveying the whole sky down to V=20mag Gaia will be detecting transients and anomalous behaviour of objects, providing near-real-time alerts to the entire astronomical community. Gaia should detected about 6000 supernovae, 1000 microlensing events and many other interesting types of transients. Thanks to its on-board low-dispersion spectrograph the classification of transients will be robust, assuring low false-alert rate. We describe the operation of the Photometric Science Alerts system, outline the scientific possibilities and conclude with an invitation to collaborate in the ground-based follow-up Gaia alerts during the early months of the mission when the outcome of the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBig Data Technologies and Applications
