The Gaia Mission

The European Space Agency’s ongoing Gaia mission has increased the number of stars with measured parallaxes and proper motions (collectively, “astrometry”) from a few million to over one billion. Gaia has expanded the region in which we can study stellar orbits from a small neighbourhood surrounding the Solar system to a much larger fraction of the Milky Way, reaching all the way to the Galactic Centre. The Gaia group at the MPIA plays a leading role in object classification and the determination of stellar parameters for the Gaia mission.