[vsnet-chat 7105] GAIA prospects for variable star survey

[Taichi Kato]

GAIA prospects for variable star survey

  All reasonably bright, periodic variable stars may be registered?

Paper: astro-ph/0506397
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 20:14:43 GMT   (222kb)

Title: Period recovery success rate expected with Gaia
Authors: L. Eyer, F. Mignard
Comments: 9 pages, 11 figures (8 in low resolution); accepted for publication
  in MNRAS
\\
  The Gaia satellite was selected as a cornerstone mission of the European
Space Agency (ESA) in October 2000 and confirmed in 2002 with a current target
launch date of 2011. The Gaia mission will gather on the same observational
principles as Hipparcos detailed astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic
properties of about 1 billion sources brighter than mag V=20. The nature of the
measured objects ranges from NEOs to gamma ray burst afterglows and encompasses
virtually any kind of stars in our Galaxy. Gaia will provide multi-colour (in
about 20 passbands extending over the visible range) photometry with typically
250 observations distributed over 40 well separated epochs during the 5-year
mission. The multi-epoch nature of the project will permit to detect and
analyse variable sources whose number is currently estimated in the range of
several tens of million, among the detectable sources.
  In this paper, we assess the performances of Gaia in analysing photometric
periodic phenomena. We first present quickly the overall observational
principle before discussing the implication of the scanning law in the time
sampling. Then from extensive simulations one assesses the performances in the
recovery of periodic signals as a function of the period, signal-to-noise ratio
and position on the sky for simple sinusoidal variability.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0506397 ,  222kb)