Table · dataset · 2026
Validation of Gaia EDR3 parallaxes
Listed in IVOA Registry (Virtual Observatory)
We construct from Gaia eDR3 an extensive catalogue of spatially resolved binary stars within ~1kpc of the Sun, with projected separations ranging from a few AU to 1pc.
Description
We estimate the probability that each pair is a chance alignment empirically, using the Gaia catalogue itself to calculate the rate of chance alignments as a function of observables. The catalogue contains 1.3 (1.1) million binaries with >90% (>99%) probability of being bound, including 16000 white dwarf-main-sequence (WD+MS) binaries and 1400 WD+WD binaries.
We make the full catalogue publicly available, as well as the queries and code to produce it. We then use this sample to calibrate the published Gaia DR3 parallax uncertainties, making use of the binary components' near-identical parallaxes. We show that these uncertainties are generally reliable for faint stars (G>=18), but are underestimated significantly for brighter stars.
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The underestimates are generally <=30% for isolated sources with well-behaved astrometry, but are larger (up to ~80%) for apparently well-behaved sources with a companion within <=4", and much larger for sources with poor astrometric fits. We provide an empirical fitting function to inflate published {sigma}p values for isolated sources. The public catalogue offers wide ranging follow-up opportunities: from calibrating spectroscopic surveys, to precisely constraining ages of field stars, to the masses and the initial-final mass relation of WDs, to dynamically probing the Galactic tidal field.
Links
Where it is published
- Reference page cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/MNRAS/506/2269 ↗
landing page · from IVOA Registry
Documentation and papers
- ADS 2021MNRAS.506.2269E ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021MNRAS.506.2269E ↗
publication · from IVOA Registry
Catalogue records · 2
- VOResource record dc.g-vo.org/oai.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=ivo_vor&identifier=ivo%3… ↗
metadata API · from IVOA Registry
- Registry record (GAVO) dc.g-vo.org/I/cds.vizier/j/mnras/506/2269 ↗
catalogue entry · from IVOA Registry
Topics
- Stated by source
- Optical
- From keywords
- Astronomy & Astrophysics
- Inferred from text
- Stellar astronomy and planetary systems 77%
Provenance · 1 source records, 9 field assertions
| Source | Key | Last seen | Raw |
|---|---|---|---|
| IVOA Registry (Virtual Observatory) | ivo://cds.vizier/j/mnras/506/2269 | 13 d ago | JSON v1 |
| Field | Assertion | Extractor | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| access_level | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[field].anzsrc:field:510109 | enrichment · IVOA Registry | taxonomy-embedding@1.1.0 | title+keywords+description (77%) |
| concepts[field].local:field:astronomy | mapping · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| concepts[modality].ivoa_waveband:optical | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| description | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | rr.resource.res_description |
| license_text | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| publication_date | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | |
| title | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 | rr.resource.res_title |
| updated_date | source · IVOA Registry | connector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0 |