Gaia Archive
The Gaia Archive holds the star catalogue of the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC). Through ScholarMuse an agent can run a cone search on Gaia DR3: give a right ascension, declination and radius, and get the sources inside that circle, brightest first, with astrometry and photometry for each.
ScholarMuse tools: query_gaia. Each successful call uses credits.
Ask your agent
What your agent gets back
Every record carries id, source, title, url, license, attribution and retrievedAt. The fields below are the data that comes from Gaia Archive.
query_gaia
One record per Gaia source. Positions are at epoch J2016.0. distancePc is a simple 1/parallax estimate and is only given when the parallax is more than 5 times its error.
- designation
- Gaia DR3 designation with the source id
- raDeg
- Right ascension in degrees (ICRS)
- decDeg
- Declination in degrees (ICRS)
- parallaxMas
- Parallax in milliarcseconds
- parallaxErrorMas
- Parallax error in milliarcseconds
- distancePc
- 1/parallax distance in parsecs, well-measured sources only
- pmRaMasYr
- Proper motion in RA, mas per year
- pmDecMasYr
- Proper motion in Dec, mas per year
- gMag
- Mean G-band magnitude
- bpRpColour
- BP minus RP colour
- radialVelocityKmS
- Radial velocity in km/s, when measured
- teffK
- Effective temperature in kelvin (GSP-Phot)
What it covers
- The main source table of Gaia Data Release 3 (gaiadr3.gaia_source).
- Astrometry (position, parallax, proper motion), G, BP and RP photometry, radial velocity, effective temperature and the RUWE quality value.
- Any position on the sky, searched by ICRS coordinates in degrees.
Limits
- Cone search only: the tool does not accept custom ADQL, joins or other Gaia tables.
- The radius is at most 1 degree and a call returns at most 500 sources (50 by default), brightest first.
- The search takes coordinates, not names; use lookup_astro_object first to get the position of a named object.
- A query can take up to 60 seconds before it times out.
How ScholarMuse reaches Gaia Archive
The connector builds a fixed ADQL cone query on gaiadr3.gaia_source from the numbers the agent gives and sends it to the ESA Gaia Archive TAP sync service at gea.esac.esa.int. No API key is sent.
Responses are cached for up to 30 days, which suits a fixed data release such as DR3.
API key: the upstream API can be called without one, so you do not add one.
Licence and attribution
Licence: Open with attribution (ESA/Gaia/DPAC); see the Gaia credit and citation guide
This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC). Gaia DR3.
Records that come from Gaia Archive carry this licence and attribution. When you cite the data in a paper, follow Gaia Archive's own citation guidance.
