skip to main content

gaia data release 3 documentation

19 Performance verification

19.5 A Golden Sample of astrophysical parameters

Gaia Collaboration et al. (2023c) analyses the astrophysical-parameter content of Gaia DR3 and produces six homogeneous samples of stars with high-quality astrophysical parameters across the HR diagram. We first focus on three samples that span a large parameter space: young massive disk stars (OBA, 3M), FGKM spectral type stars (3M), and ultra-cool dwarfs (UCDs, 20K).

We then focus on three specific samples which are of particular interest to the community: carbon stars (16K), solar analogues (6K), and the Spectro Photometric Standard Stars (SPSS, Pancino et al. 2021, 100 stars).

We demonstrate some applications of these samples in different astrophysical contexts. We use a subset of the OBA sample to illustrate its usefulness to analyse the Milky Way rotation curve. We then use the properties of the FGKM stars to analyse known exoplanetary systems. We also analyse the ages of some unseen UCD-companions to the FGKM stars. We additionally predict the colours of the Sun in various passbands (Gaia, 2MASS, WISE) using the solar-analogue sample. The six samples of stars are provided as independent catalogues which can be used in conjunction with other tables in Gaia DR3. The six tables associated with this work are named gold_sample_oba_stars, gold_sample_fgkm_stars, gold_sample_ucd, gold_sample_carbon_stars, gold_sample_spss, and gold_sample_solar_analogues. The user should refer to the individual table descriptions and Gaia Collaboration et al. (2023c) for details.