Gaia Data Release 2

Released on 25 April 2018.

Gaia DR2 is based on observations collected between 25 July 2014 and 23 May 2016 (22 months).

What does DR2 include?

• Celestial positions and Gaia ‘G’ magnitudes for nearly 1.7 billion stars.
• Parallaxes (distances), proper motions and BP/RP (blue/red photometer) colors for more than 1.3 billion stars.
• Radial velocities for more than seven million stars.
• Astrophysical parameters such as surface temperature (161 million stars), extinction and reddening (a measure of the amount of dust along the line of sight to a star; 87 million stars), radius and luminosity (76 million stars).
• Light curves and classification for about 0.5 million variable stars.
• Positions and epoch of observation of 14,099 known Solar System objects – mainly asteroids – based on more than 1.5 million observations.
• Positions and ‘G’ magnitudes for more than 0.5 million quasars –which allows the celestial reference frame to be fully defined for the first time using optical observations of extragalactic sources.

How to access data?

Data can be extracted from the Gaia Archive by performing ADQL queries and downloading the corresponding results tables. The Gaia DR2 data set is also downloadable in compressed CSV-format, but be aware that the downloadable file set is about 580 GB.

The Gaia sky, in color!

The map shows the total brightness and color of stars observed by the ESA satellite in each portion of the sky between July 2014 and May 2016.

Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of especially bright stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer bright stars are observed. The color representation is obtained by combining the total amount of light with the amount of blue and red light recorded by Gaia in each patch of the sky.

More information

Visit the ESA’s cosmos website for more details on this DR2!