Abstract
Stellar distances constitute a foundational pillar of astrophysics. The publication of 1.47 billion stellar parallaxes from Gaia is a major contribution to this. Despite Gaia’s precision, ...the majority of these stars are so distant or faint that their fractional parallax uncertainties are large, thereby precluding a simple inversion of parallax to provide a distance. Here we take a probabilistic approach to estimating stellar distances that uses a prior constructed from a three-dimensional model of our Galaxy. This model includes interstellar extinction and Gaia’s variable magnitude limit. We infer two types of distance. The first, geometric, uses the parallax with a direction-dependent prior on distance. The second, photogeometric, additionally uses the color and apparent magnitude of a star, by exploiting the fact that stars of a given color have a restricted range of probable absolute magnitudes (plus extinction). Tests on simulated data and external validations show that the photogeometric estimates generally have higher accuracy and precision for stars with poor parallaxes. We provide a catalog of 1.47 billion geometric and 1.35 billion photogeometric distances together with asymmetric uncertainty measures. Our estimates are quantiles of a posterior probability distribution, so they transform invariably and can therefore also be used directly in the distance modulus (
). The catalog may be downloaded or queried using ADQL at various sites (see
http://www.mpia.de/~calj/gedr3_distances.html
), where it can also be cross-matched with the Gaia catalog.
For the vast majority of stars in the second Gaia data release, reliable distances cannot be obtained by inverting the parallax. A correct inference procedure must instead be used to account for the ...nonlinearity of the transformation and the asymmetry of the resulting probability distribution. Here, we infer distances to essentially all 1.33 billion stars with parallaxes published in the second Gaia data release. This is done using a weak distance prior that varies smoothly as a function of Galactic longitude and latitude according to a Galaxy model. The irreducible uncertainty in the distance estimate is characterized by the lower and upper bounds of an asymmetric confidence interval. Although more precise distances can be estimated for a subset of the stars using additional data (such as photometry), our goal is to provide purely geometric distance estimates, independent of assumptions about the physical properties of, or interstellar extinction toward, individual stars. We analyze the characteristics of the catalog and validate it using clusters. The catalog can be queried using ADQL at http://gaia.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/tap.html (which also hosts the Gaia catalog) and downloaded from http://www.mpia.de/~calj/gdr2_distances.html.
The Galactic warp revealed by Gaia DR2 kinematics Poggio, E; Drimmel, R; Lattanzi, M G ...
Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Letters,
11/2018, Volume:
481, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
ABSTRACT Using Gaia DR2 astrometry, we map the kinematic signature of the Galactic stellar warp out to a distance of 7 kpc from the Sun. Combining Gaia DR2 and 2-Micron All Sky Survey photometry, we ...identify, via a probabilistic approach, $599 \, 494$ upper main sequence (UMS) stars and $12\, 616\, 068$ giants without the need for individual extinction estimates. The spatial distribution of the UMS stars clearly shows segments of the nearest spiral arms. The large-scale kinematics of both the UMS and giant populations show a clear signature of the warp of the Milky Way, apparent as a gradient of 5–6 km s−1 in the vertical velocities from 8 to 14 kpc in Galactic radius. The presence of the signal in both samples, which have different typical ages, suggests that the warp is a gravitationally induced phenomenon.
ABSTRACT The most frequently proposed model for the origin of quasars holds that the high accretion rates seen in luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) are primarily triggered during major mergers ...between gas-rich galaxies. While plausible for decades, this model has only begun to be tested with statistical rigor in the past few years. Here, we report on a Hubble Space Telescope study to test this hypothesis for z = 2 quasars with high supermassive black hole masses ( ), which dominate cosmic black hole growth at this redshift. We compare Wide Field Camera 3 (rest-frame V-band) imaging of 19 point source-subtracted quasar hosts to a matched sample of 84 inactive galaxies, testing whether the quasar hosts have greater evidence for strong gravitational interactions. Using an expert ranking procedure, we find that the quasar hosts are uniformly distributed within the merger sequence of inactive galaxies, with no preference for quasars in high-distortion hosts. Using a merger/non-merger cutoff approach, we recover distortion fractions of for quasar hosts and for inactive galaxies (distribution modes, 68% confidence intervals), with both measurements subjected to the same observational conditions and limitations. The slight enhancement in distorted fraction for quasar hosts over inactive galaxies is not significant, with a probability that the quasar fraction is higher ( ), in line with results for lower mass and lower z AGN. We find no evidence that major mergers are the primary triggering mechanism for the massive quasars that dominate accretion at the peak of cosmic quasar activity.
Passing stars may play an important role in the evolution of our solar system. We search for close stellar encounters to the Sun among all 7.2 million stars in Gaia DR2 that have six-dimensional ...phase space data. We characterize encounters by integrating their orbits through a Galactic potential and propagating the correlated uncertainties via a Monte Carlo resampling. After filtering to remove spurious data, we find 694 stars that have median (over uncertainties) closest encounter distances within 5 pc, all occurring within 15 Myr from now. 26 of these have at least a 50% chance of coming closer than 1 pc (and 7 within 0.5 pc), all but one of which are newly discovered here. We confirm some and refute several other previously-identified encounters, confirming suspicions about their data. The closest encounter in the sample is Gl 710, which has a 95% probability of coming closer than 0.08 pc (17 000 AU). Taking mass estimates obtained from Gaia astrometry and multiband photometry for essentially all encounters, we find that Gl 710 also has the largest impulse on the Oort cloud. Using a Galaxy model, we compute the completeness of the Gaia DR2 encountering sample as a function of perihelion time and distance. Only 15% of encounters within 5 pc occurring within ±5 Myr of now have been identified, mostly due to the lack of radial velocities for faint and/or cool stars. Accounting for the incompleteness, we infer the present rate of encounters within 1 pc to be 19.7 ± 2.2 per Myr, a quantity expected to scale quadratically with the encounter distance out to at least several pc. Spuriously large parallaxes in our sample from imperfect filtering would tend to inflate both the number of encounters found and this inferred rate. The magnitude of this effect is hard to quantify.
The optical lightcurves of many quasars show variations of tenths of a magnitude or more on timescales of months to years. This variation often cannot be described well by a simple deterministic ...model. We perform a Bayesian comparison of over 20 deterministic and stochastic models on 6304 quasi-steller object (QSO) lightcurves in SDSS Stripe 82. We include the damped random walk (or Ornstein-Uhlenbeck OU process), a particular type of stochastic model, which recent studies have focused on. Further models we consider are single and double sinusoids, multiple OU processes, higher order continuous autoregressive processes, and composite models. We find that only 29 out of 6304 QSO lightcurves are described significantly better by a deterministic model than a stochastic one. The OU process is an adequate description of the vast majority of cases (6023). Indeed, the OU process is the best single model for 3462 lightcurves, with the composite OU process/sinusoid model being the best in 1706 cases. The latter model is the dominant one for brighter/bluer QSOs. Furthermore, a non-negligible fraction of QSO lightcurves show evidence that not only the mean is stochastic but the variance is stochastic, too. Our results confirm earlier work that QSO lightcurves can be described with a stochastic model, but place this on a firmer footing, and further show that the OU process is preferred over several other stochastic and deterministic models. Of course, there may well exist yet better (deterministic or stochastic) models, which have not been considered here.
Modern astrometric and spectroscopic surveys have revealed a wealth of structure in the phase space of stars in the Milky Way, with evidence of resonance features and non-equilibrium processes. Using ...the third
Gaia
data release, we present evidence of a new resonance-like feature in the outer disc of the Milky Way. The feature is most evident in the angular momentum distribution of the young classical Cepheids, a population for which we can derive accurate distances over much of the Galactic disc. We then searched for similar features in the outer disc using a much larger sample of red giant stars, as well as a compiled list of over 31 million stars with spectroscopic line-of-sight velocity measurements. While much less evident in these two older samples, the distribution of stars in action-configuration space suggests that resonance features are present here as well. The position of the feature in action-configuration space suggests that the new feature may be related to the Galactic bar, but other possibilities are discussed.
The Gaia satellite will survey the entire celestial sphere down to 20th magnitude, obtaining astrometry, photometry, and low resolution specfrophotometry on one billion astronomical sources, plus ...radial velocities for over one hundred million stars. Its main objective is to take a census of the stellar content of our Galaxy, with the goal of revealing its formation and evolution. Gaia's unique feature is the measurement of parallaxes and proper motions with hitherto unparalleled accuracy for many objects. Here we describe the data analysis system put together by the Gaia consortium to classify these objects and to infer their astrophysical properties using the satellite's data. After its launch in December 2013, Gaia will nominally observe for five years, during which the system we describe will continue to evolve in light of experience with the real data.
Context. The huge and still rapidly growing amount of galaxies in modern sky surveys raises the need for an automated and objective classification method. Unsupervised learning algorithms are of ...particular interest, since they discover classes automatically. Aims. We briefly discuss the pitfalls of oversimplified classification methods and outline an alternative approach called “clustering analysis”. Methods. We have categorised different classification methods according to their capabilities. Based on this categorisation, we present a probabilistic classification algorithm that automatically detects the optimal classes preferred by the data. We explored the reliability of this algorithm in systematic tests. Using a sample of 1520 bright galaxies from the SDSS, we demonstrate the performance of this algorithm in practice. We are able to disentangle the problems of classification and parametrisation of galaxy morphologies in this case. Results. We give physical arguments that a probabilistic classification scheme is necessary. When applied to a small set of 84 galaxies visually classified as face-on discs, edge-on discs, and ellipticals, the clustering algorithm discovers precisely these classes and produces excellent object-to-class assignments. The resulting grouping of the galaxies outperforms a principal components analysis applied to the same data set. Applying the algorithm to a sample of 1520 SDSS galaxies, we find morphologically distinct classes when the number of classes are 3 and 8. Conclusions. Although interpreting clustering results is a challenging task, the algorithm we present produces reasonable morphological classes and object-to-class assignments without any prior assumptions.
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