The design and performance of the Gaia photometric system
Abstract
The European Gaia astrometry mission is due for launch in 2011. Gaia will rely on the proven principles of ESA's Hipparcos mission to create an all-sky survey of about one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond, by observing all objects down to 20th magnitude. Through its massive measurement of stellar distances, motions and multi-colour photometry it will provide fundamental data necessary for unravelling the structure, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. This paper presents the design and performance of the broad- and medium-band set of photometric filters adopted as the baseline for Gaia. The nineteen selected passbands (extending from the ultraviolet to the far-red), the criteria, and the methodology on which this choice has been based are discussed in detail. We analyse the photometric capabilities for characterizing the luminosity, temperature, gravity and chemical composition of stars. We also discuss the automatic determination of these physical parameters for the large number of observations involved, for objects located throughout the entire Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Finally, the capability of the photometric system to deal with the main Gaia science case is outlined.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0512038,
title = {The design and performance of the Gaia photometric system},
author = {C. Jordi and E. Hoeg and A. G. A. Brown and L. Lindegren and C. A. L. Bailer-Jones and J. M. Carrasco and J. Knude and V. Straizys and J. H. J. de Bruijne and J. -F. Claeskens and R. Drimmel and F. Figueras and M. Grenon and I. Kolka and M. A. C. Perryman and G. Tautvaisiene and V. Vansevicius and P. G. Willemsen and A. Bridzius and D. W. Evans and C. Fabricius and M. Fiorucci and U. Heiter and T. A. Kaempf and A. Kazlauskas and A. Kucinskas and V. Malyuto and U. Munari and C. Reyle and J. Torra and A. Vallenari and K. Zdanavicius and R. Korakitis and O. Malkov and A. Smette},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0512038},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
MNRAS, accepted 1-Dec-2005; 26 pages, 15 figures