The solar neighbourhood and ultracool dwarfs revealed by Gaia
Abstract
Gaia relies on the proven principles of ESA’s Hipparcos mission to help solve one of the most difficult yet deeply fundamental challenges in modern astronomy: the creation of an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of about one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond.
This massive stellar census provides the basic observational data to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure, and evolutionary history of our Galaxy. Since its first light 8 years ago, Gaia delivers successive catalogues with increasing accuracy and completeness.
In this talk I will present new results obtained thanks to the last release on our knowledge of the stellar content in the solar neighbourhood, including the faint end of the main sequence at the stellar to substellar limit.