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Register a new userBuilding the cosmic distance scale: from Hipparcos to Gaia
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Hipparcos, the first ever experiment of global astrometry, was launched by ESA in 1989 and its results published in 1997 (Perryman et al., Astron. Astrophys. 323, L49, 1997; Perryman & ESA (eds), The Hipparcos and Tycho catalogues, ESA SP-1200, 1997). A new reduction was later performed using an improved satellite attitude reconstruction leading to an improved accuracy for stars brighter than 9th magnitude (van Leeuwen & Fantino, Astron. Astrophys. 439, 791, 2005; van Leeuwen, Astron. Astrophys. 474, 653, 2007). The Hipparcos Catalogue provided an extended dataset of very accurate astrometric data (positions, trigonometric parallaxes and proper motions), enlarging by two orders of magnitude the quantity and quality of distance determinations and luminosity calibrations. The availability of more than 20000 stars with a trigonometric parallax known to better than 10% opened the way to a drastic revision of our 3-D knowledge of the solar neighbourhood and to a renewal of the calibration of many distance indicators and age estimations. The prospects opened by Gaia, the next ESA cornerstone, planned for launch in June 2013 (Perryman et al., Astron. Astrophys. 369, 339, 2001), are still much more dramatic: a billion objects with systematic and quasi simultaneous astrometric, spectrophotometric and spectroscopic observations, about 150 million stars with expected distances to better than 10%, all over the Galaxy. All stellar distance indicators, in very large numbers, will be directly measured, providing a direct calibration of their luminosity and making possible detailed studies of the impacts of various effects linked to chemical element abundances, age or cluster membership. With the help of simulations of the data expected from Gaia, obtained from the mission simulator developed by DPAC, we will illustrate what Gaia can provide with some selected examples.
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In this concluding article I recall the early history of the Gaia mission, showing that the original science case and expectations of wide community interest in Gaia data have been met. The quarter-century long partnership involving some 1,000 scientists, engineers and managers in industry and academia is delivering a large, high-quality and unique data set which will underpin astrophysics across many sub-fields for years to come.
This paper presents a cross-calibrated catalog of Hipparcos and Gaia astrometry to enable their use in measuring changes in proper motion, i.e., accelerations in the plane of the sky. The final catalog adopts the reference frame of the second Gaia data release (DR2) and locally cross-calibrates both the scaled Hipparcos-Gaia DR2 positional differences and the Hipparcos proper motions themselves to this frame. This gives three nearly independent proper motion measurements per star, with the scaled positional difference usually being the most precise. We find that a linear combination of the two Hipparcos reductions is superior to either reduction on its own, and address error inflation for both Hipparcos and Gaia DR2. Our adopted error inflation is additive (in quadrature) for Hipparcos and multiplicative for Gaia. We provide the covariance matrices along with the central epochs of all measurements. Our final proper motion differences are accurately Gaussian with the appropriate variances, and are suitable for acceleration measurements and orbit fitting. The catalog is constructed with an eye toward completeness; it contains nearly 98% of the Hipparcos stars. It also includes a handful of spurious entries and a few stars with poor Hipparcos reductions that the user must vet by hand. Statistical distributions of accelerations derived from this catalog should be interpreted with caution.
We present a cross-calibration of Hipparcos and Gaia EDR3 intended to identify astrometrically accelerating stars and to fit orbits to stars with faint, massive companions. The resulting catalog, the EDR3 edition of the Hipparcos-Gaia Catalog of Accelerations (HGCA), provides three proper motions with calibrated uncertainties on the EDR3 reference frame: the Hipparcos proper motion, the Gaia EDR3 proper motion, and the long-term proper motion given by the difference in position between Hipparcos and Gaia EDR3. Our approach is similar to that for the Gaia DR2 edition of the HGCA, but offers a factor of ~3 improvement in precision thanks to the longer time baseline and improved data processing of Gaia EDR3. We again find that a 60/40 mixture of the two Hipparcos reductions outperforms either reduction individually, and we find strong evidence for locally variable frame rotations between all pairs of proper motion measurements. The substantial global frame rotation seen in DR2 proper motions has been removed in EDR3. We also correct for color- and magnitude-dependent frame rotations at a level of up to ~50 $mu$as/yr in Gaia EDR3. We calibrate the Gaia EDR3 uncertainties using a sample of radial velocity standard stars without binary companions; we find an error inflation factor (a ratio of total to formal uncertainty) of 1.37. This is substantially lower than the position dependent factor of ~1.7 found for Gaia DR2 and reflects the improved data processing in EDR3. While the catalog should be used with caution, its proper motion residuals provide a powerful tool to measure the masses and orbits of faint, massive companions to nearby stars.
The Perseus Arm is the closest Galactic spiral arm from the Sun, offering an excellent opportunity to study in detail its stellar population. However, its distance has been controversial with discrepancies by a factor of two. Kinematic distances are in the range 3.9-4.2 kpc as compared to 1.9-2.3 kpc from spectrophotometric and trigonometric parallaxes, reinforcing previous claims that this arm exhibits peculiar velocities. We used the astrometric information of a sample of 31 OB stars from the star-forming W3 Complex to identify another 37 W3 members and to derive its distance from their Gaia-DR2 parallaxes with improved accuracy. The Gaia-DR2 distance to the W3 Complex,2.14$^{+0.08}_{-0.07}$ kpc, coincides with the previous stellar distances of $sim$ 2 kpc. The Gaia-DR2 parallaxes tentatively show differential distances for different parts of the W3 Complex: W3 Main, located to the NE direction, is at 2.30$^{+0.19}_{-0.16}$ kpc, the W3 Cluster (IC 1795), in the central region of the complex, is at 2.17$^{+0.12}_{-0.11}$ kpc, and W3(OH) is at 2.00$^{+0.29}_{-0.23}$ kpc to the SW direction. The W3 Cluster is the oldest region, indicating that it triggered the formation of the other two star-forming regions located at the edges of an expanding shell around the cluster.
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