Gaia and VLT astrometry of faint stars: Precision of Gaia DR1 positions and updated VLT parallaxes of ultracool dwarfs

TL;DR

This study assesses Gaia DR1 astrometric precision at faint magnitudes using VLT/FORS2 data, revealing under/overestimation in Gaia uncertainties and refining parallaxes of ultracool dwarfs and brown dwarfs.

Contribution

It provides an independent verification of Gaia DR1 positional uncertainties and updates parallaxes for ultracool dwarfs using VLT/FORS2 observations.

Findings

Gaia DR1 uncertainties are underestimated for stars with 0.5-5 mas precision.

Gaia DR1 uncertainties are overestimated for stars with 7-10 mas precision.

Refined parallaxes of 20 ultracool dwarfs and the Luhman 16 binary system.

Abstract

We compared positions of the Gaia first data release (DR1) secondary data set at its faint limit with CCD positions of stars in 20 fields observed with the VLT/FORS2 camera. The FORS2 position uncertainties are smaller than one milli-arcsecond (mas) and allowed us to perform an independent verification of the DR1 astrometric precision. In the fields that we observed with FORS2, we projected the Gaia DR1 positions into the CCD plane, performed a polynomial fit between the two sets of matching stars, and carried out statistical analyses of the residuals in positions. The residual RMS roughly matches the expectations given by the Gaia DR1 uncertainties, where we identified three regimes in terms of Gaia DR1 precision: for G = 17-20 stars we found that the formal DR1 position uncertainties of stars with DR1 precisions in the range of 0.5-5 mas are underestimated by 63 +/- 5\%, whereas the DR1 uncertainties of stars in the range 7-10 mas are overestimated by a factor of two. For the best-measured and generally brighter G = 16-18 stars with DR1 positional uncertainties of <0.5 mas, we detected 0.44 +/- 0.13 mas excess noise in the residual RMS, whose origin can be in both FORS2 and Gaia DR1. By adopting Gaia DR1 as the absolute reference frame we refined the pixel scale determination of FORS2, leading to minor updates to the parallaxes of 20 ultracool dwarfs that we published previously. We also updated the FORS2 absolute parallax of the Luhman 16 binary brown dwarf system to 501.42 +/- 0.11 mas