Transient Astronomy with the Gaia Satellite

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• Simon Hodgkin
• Wednesday 18 January 2012, 13:45-14:15
• Sackler Lecture Theatre, IoA.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ben Davies.

Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) astrometry space mission, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. Gaia’s main goal is to collect high-precision astrometric data (i.e. positions, parallaxes, and proper motions) for the brightest 1 billion objects in the sky. These data, complemented with multi-band, multi-epoch photometric and spectroscopic data collected from the same observing platform, will allow astronomers to reconstruct the formation history, structure, and evolution of the Galaxy.

Gaia will observe the whole sky for 5 years, providing a unique opportunity for the discovery of large numbers of transient and anomalous events, e.g.supernovae, novae and microlensing events, GRB afterglows, Fallback Supernovae, and other theoretical or unexpected phenomena. The Photometric Science Alerts team has been tasked with the early detection, classification and prompt release of anomalous sources in the Gaia data stream. I will discuss the challenges we face in preparing to use Gaia to search for transient pheonomena at optical wavelengths.

This talk is part of the Institute of Astronomy Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge Astronomy Talks
• Combined External Astrophysics Talks DAMTP
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• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
• Institute of Astronomy Seminars
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• Sackler Lecture Theatre, IoA

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