Gaia UK news

We are pleased to report that one of our colleagues, Dr George Seabroke, won this year’s MSSL Elizabeth Puchnarewicz Award for Outstanding Contribution to Public Outreach.

A group of astronomers working at the Liverpool John Moores University used the SPRAT spectrograph installed on the Liverpool Telescope to confirm that one of the Gaia alerts (listed on Gaia Photometric Science Alerts: Validation Phase page), Gaia14aat, is a dwarf nova.

We have just released our first batch of alerts. You can find more information, and the candidates on Gaia Photometric Science Alerts: Validation Phase page.

While scanning the sky to measure the positions and movements of stars in our Galaxy, Gaia has discovered its first stellar explosion in another galaxy far, far away.