Selection of stars to calibrate Gaia

Abstract

Gaia is an all-sky survey satellite, launched by ESA on 19th December 2013, to obtain parallaxes and proper motions to microarcsecond level precision, radial velocities and astrophysical parameters for about one billion objects down to a limiting magnitude of 20. The chosen strategy to perform the photometric calibration is to split the process into two steps, internal and external calibration. The internal calibration will combine all different transits of a given source to a common reference internal system producing a 'mean' Gaia observation. This internal calibration accounts for the differential instrumental effects (in sensitivity, aperture, PSF, etc.). They depend on the colour and type of the source. For this reason, a selection of calibration sources ensuring a good representation of all kind of observed sources is needed. The entire magnitude and colour range of the sources have to be covered by these calibration stars and for all calibration intervals. It is a challenge to obtain a suitable colour distribution for the standards, especially for bright sources and the daily large scale calibration intervals. Once the mean Gaia observations are produced, a final step, the external calibration, transforms them to absolute fluxes and wavelengths. In principle, few calibration sources are needed (about 200 spectrophotometric standard stars, SPSS, are currently being considered). They need to have accurate determinations of their absolute fluxes and their non-variability need to be ensured below 1% precision. For this purpose, a big international observational effort is being done (using telescopes as 2.2m@CAHA, TNG@LaPalma, NTT@LaSilla, LaRuca@SPM, and others). During this observational effort some cases of non-expected variability of the SPSS candidates have been discovered. <P />