Gaia: a giant leap for astrophysics

Since 2014, ESA's Gaia satellite measures the positions  of a huge number of stars of our Milky Way in order to gain a better understanding of the structure and evolution of our home galaxy.  In recent decades, astronomers have learned a great deal about the structure and development of the Milky Way system. But many questions are still open.

On April 25, 2018, the second Gaia catalogue (Gaia DR2) was published: From more than 1.3 billion stars, the positions, motions, parallaxes (distances), magnitudes (brightnesses)  and colors of the stars were determined with high precision. These data are a source of new knowledge in practically all fields of astrophysics and on average almost five scientific papers  based on Gaia DR2 are published every day. After an overview of the Gaia mission some scientific highlights will be presented followed by an outlook on the prospects of the next data releases.