Estimated distances to 1.33 billion stars in Gaia DR2

These have been estimated using the parallaxes (and their uncertainties) from Gaia DR2. A Bayesian procedure was used involving a prior with a single parameter L(l,b), which varies smoothly with Galactic longitude and latitude according to a Galaxy model.

The posterior is summarized with a point estimate (usually the mode) and a confidence interval (usually the 68% highest density interval). The estimation procedure is described in detail in the `accompanying paper`_, which also analyses the catalogue content. .. _accompanying paper: mpia.de/homes/calj/gdr2_distances.html