Gaia, III

Remember Gaia, aka IntCal-in-Space? Over the past week, Nyrath's twitter has filled up with science-fiction nerds frantically updating their galactic maps with the new (third) data-release. Today we have a write-up, for the rest of us.

Gaia like Webb is a L2 halo-orbiter. Gettin' crowded up there. The write-up says we've decempled (10x, if it be a word) our spottage of nearby asteroids so, maybe next time it can see one before it whacks the 'scopes up there.

And the prior dataset of 300k+ binary systems is now 800k. Also promised - promised - is that Gaia will find pretty much every Jupiter-plus planet in our solar neighbourhood. I am unsure how this radius be defined and, further, how they can tell for a wide-orbit planet, since such would require lengthy observation. Precision is necessary but insufficient, as the saying goes.

Behind-the-scenes, the dataset has got parallax accurate to the 10-microarcsecond +/- 50 μas. I mean, if the parallax is above HD 57852's 0.030as +/- 230 μas. Inverse of that is 34.65-35.21 parsecs which is, indeed, skating the classical 100 lightyear range. Seems to me that this is plenty accurate for our Local Bubble.

Gaia did, it seems, verify ε Indi A's (cold!) 3.25-Jupiter planet; which we add to its brown-dwarfs which are Ba and Bb. I am told Webb may be on the track to observe this Jovian directly. At 11.55 AU from a K5V, its Kirkwoods are well outside ε Indi's habitable-zone.

And then there was this 9J around a whitedwarf.