Workshop2021:rationale
Gaia and Gaia Alerts
ESA Gaia is continuing operations and is now well into its extended mission. DPAC have just released EDR3 with unprecedented astrometric and photometric data, and Gaia Photometric Science Alerts continues as a well established and leading transient survey. It discovers nearly 4000 objects a year from all over the sky, down to G=19, covering all possible classes of transients, from supernovae and CVs to rare phenomena like microlensing events or pair-instability supernovae.
Gaia Alerts Science
The transient discovery machine within Gaia is constantly evolving allowing for more accurate transient identification. The longer baseline of Gaia data also allows for more robust detections of photometric anomalies. The alerting system is now also sensitive to slowly changing astrophysical events such as flares in distant quasars, young stellar objects, Be-type stars and microlensing events due to massive lenses.
Follow-up
At the same time, we are seeing significant evolution in the area of photometric and spectroscopic follow-up. Robotisation and queue-scheduling of many telescopes enables more efficient coordination of long-term time-domain observations.
Workshop's promise
The forthcoming Gaia Alerts Workshop, the 12th in the series, will be an opportunity to learn about the current state (and future plans for) Gaia and Gaia Alerts. We aim to discuss the detection, filtering, classification and publication of candidates. We will discover the most recent scientific highlights from Gaia Alerts, and we will explore the scientific potential of the programme.
During the workshop we will also explore the new possibilities offered by the Opticon-Radionet-Pilot H2020 in planning, obtaining and reducing in an efficient manner followup observations of transient alerts reported by other (non-GAIA) facilities.
Multimessenger time-domain
In particular, we would like to extend the invitation to all time-domain astronomical activities, spanning all electromagnetic spectrum from radio, through optical to X-rays, and other domains (gravitational waves, neutrino detectors). We hope this workshop will be an opportunity for improving the coordination within time-domain astronomy and increase the scientific output of surveys and follow-up observations in the multi-messenger era.
