Waiting for Gaia's second data release
Date: 05 April 2018
Satellite: Gaia
Copyright: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Based on 22 months of observations, the second release of Gaia's data contains the position on the sky and brightness of 1 692 919 135 stars, as well as measurements of the parallax and proper motion of 1 331 909 727 stars.
It also includes a wide range of additional information: the colours of 1.38 billion stars; the radial velocities of 7 224 631 stars; information about 550 737 variable sources; an estimate of the surface temperature for 161 497 595 stars, of the extinction – a measure of the amount of dust along the line of sight – for 87 733 672 stars, and of the radius and luminosity of 76 956 778 stars.
Closer to home, the new data set also contains the position of 14 099 Solar System objects – mostly asteroids – based on more than 1.5 million observations.
The second data release of Gaia is scheduled for publication on 25 April 2018.
More details on the release content here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO License. 
