Gaia Data Release 3: A Golden Sample of Astrophysical Parameters

TL;DR

Gaia DR3 offers high-quality astrophysical parameters for half a billion stars, enabling diverse astrophysical analyses and providing valuable homogeneous samples for the community.

Contribution

This work validates Gaia DR3 data quality and presents six homogeneous stellar samples with astrophysical parameters across the HR diagram, including new homogeneous sets for standard stars and specific stellar types.

Findings

Validated Gaia DR3 astrophysical parameters through internal and external comparisons.

Produced six homogeneous stellar samples covering a wide parameter space.

Demonstrated applications in Galactic rotation, exoplanet analysis, and solar color predictions.

Abstract

Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) provides a wealth of new data products for the astronomical community to exploit, including astrophysical parameters for a half billion stars. In this work we demonstrate the high quality of these data products and illustrate their use in different astrophysical contexts. We query the astrophysical parameter tables along with other tables in Gaia DR3 to derive the samples of the stars of interest. We validate our results by using the Gaia catalogue itself and by comparison with external data. We have produced six homogeneous samples of stars with high quality astrophysical parameters across the HR diagram for the community to exploit. We first focus on three samples that span a large parameter space: young massive disk stars (~3M), FGKM spectral type stars (~3M), and UCDs (~20K). We provide these sources along with additional information (either a flag or complementary parameters) as tables that are made available in the Gaia archive. We furthermore identify 15740 bone fide carbon stars, 5863 solar-analogues, and provide the first homogeneous set of stellar parameters of the Spectro Photometric Standard Stars. We use a subset of the OBA sample to illustrate its usefulness to analyse the Milky Way rotation curve. We then use the properties of the FGKM stars to analyse known exoplanet systems. We also analyse the ages of some unseen UCD-companions to the FGKM stars. We additionally predict the colours of the Sun in various passbands (Gaia, 2MASS, WISE) using the solar-analogue sample.