ICYMI, there will be some new #GaiaMission data products being released toward the end of this year.

1. Astrometry and photometry of sources in Omega Cen from engineering images
2. The first results of quasars' environment analysis for gravitational lenses search.
3. Extended radial velocity epoch data for Long Period Variables.
4. Diffuse Interstellar Bands from aggregated RVS spectra.
5. Updated astrometry for Solar System objects

Announcement: cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/news

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@rdrimmel we found that the DIB processing in DR3 had so many issues as to be effectively unusable, and a number of their main conclusions to be incorrect. This is the process of science, and we bear them no ill will, of course. Do you know whether the team is going to be taking our work into account? ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022

Measuring the 8621 Å Diffuse Interstellar Band in Gaia DR3 RVS Spectra: Obtaining a Clean Catalog by Marginalizing over Stellar Types

Diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) are broad absorption features associated with interstellar dust and can serve as chemical and kinematic tracers. Conventional measurements of DIBs in stellar spectra are complicated by residuals between observations and best-fit stellar models. To overcome this, we simultaneously model the spectrum as a combination of stellar, dust, and residual components, with full posteriors on the joint distribution of the components. This decomposition is obtained by modeling each component as a draw from a high-dimensional Gaussian distribution in the data-space (the observed spectrum) -- a method we call "Marginalized Analytic Data-space Gaussian Inference for Component Separation" (MADGICS). We use a data-driven prior for the stellar component, which avoids missing stellar features not included in synthetic line lists. This technique provides statistically rigorous uncertainties and detection thresholds, which are required to work in the low signal-to-noise regime that is commonplace for dusty lines of sight. We reprocess all public Gaia DR3 RVS spectra and present an improved 8621 Å DIB catalog, free of detectable stellar line contamination. We constrain the rest-frame wavelength to $8623.14 \pm 0.087$ Å (vacuum), find no significant evidence for DIBs in the Local Bubble from the $1/6^{\rm{th}}$ of RVS spectra that are public, and show unprecedented correlation with kinematic substructure in Galactic CO maps. We validate the catalog, its reported uncertainties, and biases using synthetic injection tests. We believe MADGICS provides a viable path forward for large-scale spectral line measurements in the presence of complex spectral contamination.

ui.adsabs.harvard.edu

@jegpeek Well, since I'm on the team, I'll see what they can do, though I believe no further changes can be made to the SW that will be doing the processing at this point.

@rdrimmel great. If I am honest I do not think the DIB work was up to the incredibly high standard the Gaia team has set for itself (and met!) since DR1. We were extremely excited to work with those data but they are too highly corrupted to use for science.

@rdrimmel did not mean to offend. Hope we can discuss in Leiden in February!

@jegpeek Mathias will be there, so there will be the opportunity.

@jegpeek In any case Josh, work like this one will definitely help us validate our results and improve processing for DR4.

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