2016/02/02 by Gisella Clementini, G. Clementini, Clementini, Gisella
Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1602.01104
Invited review in: RR Lyrae 2015 - High-Precision Studies of RR Lyrae stars, Visegrad, Hungary, October 19-22, 2015, 8 pages. To be published in Communications from the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Vol. 105
openalex publication_date 2016/02/02 · arxiv created 2016/02/23 · arxiv updated 2016/02/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Gaia, the European Space Agency spacecraft successfully launched on 19 December 2013, entered into nominal science operations on 18 July 2014 after a few months of commissioning, and has been scanning the sky to a faint limit of G = 20.7 mag since then. Gaia is expected to observe more than a hundred thousand RR Lyrae stars in the Galactic halo and bulge (most of which will be new discoveries), and to provide parallax measurements with about 10 μas uncertainty for those brighter than <V>∼ 12-13 mag. Status and activities of the spacecraft since launch are briefly reviewed with emphasis on preliminary results obtained for RR Lyrae stars observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud during the first 28 days of science operations spent in Ecliptic Pole scanning mode and in light of the first Gaia data release which is scheduled for summer 2016.