skip to main content

gaia data release 3 documentation

14.1 Introduction

14.1.13 QSO and galaxy candidates

Gaia DR3 includes two tables of extra-galactic sources, or rather candidate sources: qso_candidates and galaxy_candidates. They compile the results from several different pipelines with the philosophy of going for completeness rather than purity. They therefore contain a large fraction of sources which are clearly not extra-galactic, showing, e.g., sources that are rather too bright as seen in Figure 14.35. It is therefore relevant to use the various flags and quality indicators.

We also notice morphological parameters with unrealistically small (formal) uncertainties, cf. Figure 14.36 and Figure 14.37.