Gaia Photometric Science Alerts

We show that the Gaia Science Alerts project suffers from very low contamination, that is there are very few false- positives. We find that the external completeness for supernovae, C_E_=0.46, is dominated by the Gaia scanning law and the requirement of detections from both fields-of-view. Where we have two or more scans the internal completeness is C_I_=0.79 at 3 arcsec or larger from the centres of galaxies, but it drops closer in, especially within 1 arcsec.

The per-transit photometry for Gaia transients is precise to 1 per cent at G=13, and 3 per cent at G=19. The per- transit astrometry is accurate to 55 milliarcseconds when compared to Gaia DR2. The Gaia Science Alerts project is one of the most homogeneous and productive transient surveys in operation, and it is the only survey which covers the whole sky at high spatial resolution (subarcsecond), including the Galactic plane and bulge.