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gaia data release 3 documentation

12 Integrated extragalactic tables

12.4 Recommendations for the exploitation of the extragalactic tables

Author(s): David Teyssier, Coryn Bailer-Jones

The integrated extragalactic tables contain a varied set of information that do not necessarily show full consistency between the different modules contributing to its content. A cautious interpretation of these data when taken as a whole, or in part, is necessary depending on the scientific use cases applying its exploitation.

As explained in Section 12.2, the tables have been populated with a completeness-driven selection function, especially from the DSC module, and a significant fraction of sources in the tables are of stellar nature. This low purity level was intentional and meant at allowing the users to select their own samples using the quality indicators and class probabilities, and/or combine the Gaia data with those of other surveys, in particular from additional photometric bands.

For those users interested in drawing purer samples directly from the available information in the Gaia DR3 tables, we refer to the recommendations given in Gaia Collaboration et al. (2023b).