Gaia’s Third Data Release!

It seems like only yesterday that I blogged about the second release of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission but today sees the release of the third data set, known to its friends as DR3. This completes the set after some initial data were released early as EDR3 back in 2020.

Gaia on the Launchpad at Kourou, French Guyana, on 13th December 2013

In case you weren’t aware, Gaia, launched way back in 2013, is an ambitious space mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracy needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.

Gaia is likely to operate until round about November 2024, so there’s a lot of data yet to come.

You can find a complete list of what is in DR3 here and if you want to go straight into the papers based on this dataset, go here. There is a nice promotional video here:

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