Workshop2019:rationale

Gaia is now a well established and leading transient mission. It discovers nearly 2000 objects a year from all over the sky, down to about 20 mag, covering all possible classes of transients, from supernovae and CVs to rare phenomena like microlensing events or pair-instability supernovae.

The transient discovery machine within Gaia is constantly evolving and year 2019 brings many significant improvements and changes in the Gaia Alerts system and its operation. The long baseline of Gaia data allows for more robust detections of photometric anomalies.

The alerting system is now also sensitive to slowly changing astrophysical events such like flares in distant quasars, young stellar object, Be-type stars or microlensing events due to massive lenses.

On the other hand, the evolution of the follow-up observations is also visible. Robotisation of telescope and queue-scheduled modes of operation of many telescopes allows for more efficient coordination for long-term time-domain astrophysical observations.

The 2019 Gaia Alerts Workshop, the 10th in the series, will again be an opportunity to learn about Gaia and Gaia Alerts, to meet people behind the pipelines and web pages, to find out about most recent scientific highlights from Gaia Alerts and to discuss the scientific potential of this programme.