"Gaia EDR3 bright star parallax zero-point using stellar clusters" - Flynn et al. (2021)
Alan Duffy
The incredible Gaia spacecraft has been monitoring the almost imperceptible drift of the stars in our Milky Way for the last decade, allowing us to measure their exact 3D position using the powerful parallax method. Yet even these measures can be improved in time as we better learn the capabilities and idiosyncrasies of the observatory and that’s exactly what Swinburne’s Dr Chris Flynn has done in this incredible paper, funded by a John Templeton Foundation grant. He used the Gaia estimated parallax distances for clusters of stars (literally called star clusters) that should all be moving together and be at the same distance from us, as they are a tightly bound ball of stars in our Milky Way. Any difference from that shared distance is then a possible statistical correction that can be applied to the 100 MILLION stars in the Gaia survey. Great work Chris!