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SUMMARY:Transient Astronomy with the Gaia Satellite - Simon Hodgkin
DTSTART:20120118T134500Z
DTEND:20120118T141500Z
UID:TALK33840@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ben Davies
DESCRIPTION:Gaia is a European Space Agency (ESA) astrometry space mission
 \, and a successor to the ESA Hipparcos mission. Gaia’s main goal is to 
 collect high-precision astrometric data (i.e. positions\, parallaxes\, and
  proper motions) for the brightest 1 billion objects in the sky. These dat
 a\, complemented with multi-band\, multi-epoch photometric and spectroscop
 ic data collected from the same observing platform\, will allow astronomer
 s to reconstruct the formation history\, structure\, and evolution of the 
 Galaxy.\n\nGaia will observe the whole sky for 5 years\, providing a uniqu
 e opportunity for the discovery of large numbers of transient and anomalou
 s events\, e.g.supernovae\, novae and microlensing events\, GRB afterglows
 \, Fallback Supernovae\, and other theoretical or unexpected phenomena. Th
 e Photometric Science Alerts team has been tasked with the early detection
 \, classification and prompt release of anomalous sources in the Gaia data
  stream. I will discuss the challenges we face in preparing to use Gaia to
  search for transient pheonomena at optical wavelengths.\n\n
LOCATION:Sackler Lecture Theatre\, IoA
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