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Description
</pre><p>Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.
<p>The data collected during the first 22 months of the nominal, five-year mission have been processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), resulting into this second data release. A summary of the release properties is provided in Gaia Collaboration et al. (2018b). The overall scientific validation of the data is described in Arenou et al. (2018). Background information on the mission and the spacecraft can be found in Gaia Collaboration et al. (2016), with a more detailed presentation of the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) in Cropper et al. (2018). In addition, Gaia DR2 is accompanied by various, dedicated papers that describe the processing and validation of the various data products: Lindegren et al. (2018) for the Gaia DR2 astrometry, Riello et al. (2018) and Evans et al. (2018) for the Gaia DR2 photometry, Sartoretti et al. (2018), Soubiran et al. (2018), and Katz et al. (2018) for the Gaia DR2 spectroscopy (radial velocities), Holl et al. (2018) for the Gaia DR2 variability, Andrae et al. (2018) for the Gaia DR2 astrophysical parameters, Gaia Collaboration et al. (2018g) for the Solar-system objects, and Gaia Collaboration et al. (2018f) for the celestial reference frame. Four more papers present a glimpse of the scientific richness of the data in the areas of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2018a), the mapping of the kinematics and large-scale structure of the Milky Way (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2018e), parallaxes and proper motions of Milky Way satellite galaxies (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2018d), and variable stars in the colour-magnitude diagram (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2018c). In addition to the set of references mentioned above, this documentation provides a detailed, complete overview of the processing and validation of the Gaia DR2 data.
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