Events in Physics

Gaia: switching on the transient detection machine

Gaia, an all-sky astrometric survey, is ESA's flagship mission for the next five years. In late August 2014 the mission had started its nominal operation mode, discovering its first Gaia Supernova (Gaia14aaa) just two weeks after! In this talk I will discuss the power of Gaia as a transient survey and its detection capabilities, with a special emphasis on nuclear transients. I will also discuss the performance of GS-TEC, the automated realtime classification of low-resolution Gaia spectro-photometry, the status of the follow-up and validation campaigns and the results from the first two months of mission data.