Gaia, Fundamental Physics, and Dark Matter

TL;DR

The Gaia mission's precise stellar data is revolutionizing our understanding of fundamental physics and dark matter, offering new insights and potential connections to planetary systems.

Contribution

This paper highlights Gaia's role in advancing fundamental physics and dark matter research, proposing novel avenues like linking stellar activity with dark matter streams.

Findings

Gaia data improves constraints on dark matter distribution.

Potential correlations between stellar activity and dark matter streams.

New methods for analyzing high-precision stellar motions.

Abstract

The Gaia space astrometry mission is measuring accurate distances and space motions of more than two billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. This is a first look at how Gaia is contributing to fundamental physics, and in particular to our understanding of dark matter, for which a few examples are given from the current literature. One of our goals is to illustrate how deep, and often surprising, insight into very diverse areas of fundamental physics can be extracted from this new and enormous high-accuracy stellar data set. In this spirit, we finish by suggesting a search for a connection between stellar activity, dark matter streams, and planetary configuration in nearby exoplanetary systems, as has been tentatively proposed in the case of the solar system.