No Arabic abstract
In this article we present an overview of the ESA Gaia mission and of the unprecedented impact that Gaia will have on the field of variable star research. We summarise the contents and impact of the first Gaia data release on the description of variability phenomena, with particular emphasis on pulsating star research. The Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution, although limited to 2.1 million stars, has been used in many studies related to pulsating stars. Furthermore a set of 3,194 Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars with their times series have been released. Finally we present the plans for the ongoing study of variable phenomena with Gaia and highlight some of the possible impacts of the second data release on variable, and specifically, pulsating stars.
We present a sub-arcsecond cross-match of Gaia DR2 against the INT Photometric H-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane Data Release 2 (IPHAS DR2) and the Kepler-INT Survey (KIS). The resulting value-added catalogues (VACs) provide additional precise photometry to the Gaia photometry (r, i and H-alpha for IPHAS, with additional U and g for KIS). In building the catalogue, proper motions given in gaia DR2 are wound back to match the epochs of IPHAS DR2, thus ensuring high proper motion objects are appropriately cross-matched. The catalogues contain 7,927,224 and 791,071 sources for IPHAS and KIS, respectively. The requirement of >5-sigma parallax detection for every included source means that distances out to 1--1.5 kpc are well covered. We define two additional parameters for each catalogued object: (i) $f_c$, a magnitude-dependent tracer of the quality of the Gaia astrometric fit; (ii) $f_{FP}$, the false-positive rate for parallax measurements determined from astrometric fits of a given quality at a given magnitude. Selection cuts based on these parameters can be used to clean colour-magnitude and colour-colour diagrams in a controlled and justified manner. We provide both full and ligh
The ESA cornerstone mission Gaia was successfully launched in 2013, and is now scanning the sky to accurately measure the positions and motions of about two billion point-like sources of 3<V<20.5 mag, with the main goal of reconstructing the 6D phase space structure of the Milky Way. The typical uncertainties in the astrometry will be in the range 30-500 muas. The sky will be repeatedly scanned (70 times on average) for five years or more, adding the time dimension, and the Gaia data are complemented by mmag photometry in three broad bands, plus line-of-sight velocities from medium resolution spectroscopy for brighter stars. This impressive dataset is having a large impact on various areas of astrophysics, from solar system objects to distant quasars, from nearby stars to unresolved galaxies, from binaries and extrasolar planets to light bending experiments. This invited review paper presents an overview of the Gaia mission and describes why, to reach the goal performances in astrometry and to adequately map the Milky Way kinematics, Gaia was also equipped with state-of-the-art photometers and spectrographs, enabling us to explore much more than the 6D phase-space of positions and velocities. Scientific highlights of the first two Gaia data releases are briefly presented.
The HASH (Hong Kong/ AAO/ Strasbourg/ H{alpha}) planetary nebula research platform is a unique data repository with a graphical interface and SQL capability that offers the community powerful, new ways to undertake Galactic PN studies. HASH currently contains multi-wavelength images, spectra, positions, sizes, morphologies and other data whenever available for 2401 true, 447 likely, and 692 possible Galactic PNe, for a total of 3540 objects. An additional 620 Galactic post-AGB stars, pre-PNe, and PPN candidates are included. All objects were classified and evaluated following the precepts and procedures established and developed by our group over the last 15 years. The complete database contains over 6,700 Galactic objects including the many mimics and related phenomena previously mistaken or confused with PNe. Curation and updating currently occurs on a weekly basis to keep the repository as up to date as possible until the official release of HASH v1 planned in the near future.
Stellar variability studies are now reaching a completely new level thanks to ESAs Gaia mission, which enables us to locate many variable stars in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and determine the various instability strips/bands. Furthermore, this mission also allows us to detect, characterise and classify many millions of new variable stars thanks to its very unique nearly simultaneous multi-epoch survey with different instruments (photometer, spectro-photometer, radial velocity spectrometer). An overview of what can be found in literature in terms of mostly data products by the Gaia consortium is given. This concerns the various catalogues of variable stars derived from the Gaia time series and also the location and motion of variable stars in the observational Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. In addition, we provide a list of a few thousands of variable white dwarf candidates derived from the DR2 published data, among them probably many hundreds of new pulsating white dwarfs. On a very different topic, we also show how Gaia allows us to reveal the 3D structures of and around the Milky Way thanks to the RR Lyrae 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.