GAIA

Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population [Source ESA].

The Gaia Coordination Unit for Variability Processing (CU7) is in charge of characterising the photometric and spectral variability.

This includes deriving statistical parameters, searching for periods and fitting to simple models. Then variable objects (stars/QSOs) will be classified. Further analysis of particular types will be carried out.