The Gaia Mission, Binary Stars and Exoplanets

Laurent Eyer, Lorenzo Rimoldini, Berry Holl, Pierre North, Shay Zucker, Dafydd W. Evans, Dimitri Pourbaix, Simon T. Hodgkin, William Thuillot, Nami Mowlavi, Benoit Carry

(Submitted on 12 Feb 2015)

On the 19th of December 2013, the Gaia spacecraft was successfully launched by a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana and started its amazing journey to map and characterise one billion celestial objects with its one billion pixel camera. In this presentation, we briefly review the general aims of the mission and describe what has happened since launch, including the Ecliptic Pole scanning mode. We also focus especially on binary stars, starting with some basic observational aspects, and then turning to the remarkable harvest that Gaia is expected to yield for these objects.

Comments: 15 pages, 8 figures. LIVING TOGETHER PLANETS, HOST STARS and BINARIES, Proceedings of a Proceedings of a Conference held in held at Litomy\v{s}l, Czech Republic. Edited by Slavek M. Rucinski, Guillermo Torres and Miloslav Zejda. Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Conference Series, 2015

Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)

Cite as: arXiv:1502.03829 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1502.03829v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)

Submission history

From: Eyer Laurent  

[v1] Thu, 12 Feb 2015 21:10:21 GMT (6257kb)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03829