Estimated distances to 1.33 billion stars in Gaia DR2
Short Name:
gdr2dist scs
Date:
04 Apr 2022 15:48:41
Publisher:
The GAVO DC team
Description:
This catalogue provides distances estimates (and uncertainties therein)
for 1.33 billion stars over the whole sky brighter than about G=20.7.
These have been estimated using the parallaxes (and their uncertainties)
from Gaia DR2. A Bayesian procedure was used involving a prior
with a single parameter L(l,b), which varies smoothly with Galactic
longitude and latitude according to a Galaxy model. The posterior is
summarized with a point estimate (usually the mode) and a confidence
interval (usually the 68% highest density interval). The estimation
procedure is described in detail in the `accompanying paper`_,
which also analyses the catalogue content.
.. _accompanying paper: http://www.mpia.de/homes/calj/gdr2_distances.html
Spectra from the Flash and Heros Echelle spectrographs developed at
Landessternwarte Heidelberg and mounted at La Silla and various other
observatories. The data mostly contains spectra of OB stars. Heros was
the name of the instrument after Flash got a second channel in 1995.