The Gaia collaboration receives the 2023 Berkeley Prize
This mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), in which astronomers and engineers at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the Universitat de Barcelona (ICCUB) and at the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) has been collaborating since its launch in 2013, has recorded stellar positions, distances, colours, and proper motions for nearly two billion stars in our galaxy.
The mission’s third release, called Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3), comprises the largest low-resolution spectroscopic and radial velocity surveys in history, capturing detailed information and mapping roughly 1.8 billion Milky Way stars, including 10 million variable stars and 813,000 binary systems. In addition, the mission enables advances in both extragalactic and solar system science: it has catalogued 3 million galaxies, 2 million quasars (distant and bright galactic nuclei), and 156,000 solar system objects, including near-Earth and main-belt asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects.
According to the prize statement, the data of DR3 —published on 13 June 2022, and accompanied by nearly 50 scientific articles by the Gaia collaboration— “will be long regarded as major events in the history of astronomy, triggering a global partnership to better understand the origin, structure, and destiny of our home galaxy.”
The Gaia data catalogues are produced by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), a collaboration that consists of hundreds of scientists and engineers from around the world.
Awarded annually since 2011 by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and supported by a grant from the New York Community Trust, the Berkeley Prize includes a monetary compensation and an invitation to give the closing plenary lecture at the AAS winter meeting, to be held in Seattle, Washington, from 8 to 12 January 2023.
ICCUB-IEEC contribution to Gaia
In addition to the ICCUB and the IEEC, which lead the Spanish contribution, several Spanish institutions actively participate in the Gaia Collaboration: the University of A Coruña (UdC), the University of Vigo (UVigo), the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS).
The role of the ICCUB-IEEC focused on the scientific and technological design of the project, the development of the data processing system and the production of simulated data. A part of the software for the processing of the data sent by the satellite has been developed by the ICCUB-IEEC team and is executed at the MareNostrum computer of the BSC.
Image:
Caption: An artist’s illustration of ESA's Gaia satellite is shown here over a background image of the sky that was compiled using Gaia data from more than 1.8 billion observed stars.
Credit: Spacecraft: ESA/ATG medialab; Milky Way: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.