Period recovery success rate expected with Gaia

Abstract

The Gaia satellite was selected as a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) in October 2000 and confirmed in 2002 with a current target launch date of 2011. The Gaia mission will gather on the same observational principles as Hipparcos detailed astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic properties of about 1 billion sources brighter than mag V=20. The nature of the measured objects ranges from NEOs to gamma ray burst afterglows and encompasses virtually any kind of stars in our Galaxy. Gaia will provide multi-colour (in about 20 passbands extending over the visible range) photometry with typically 250 observations distributed over 40 well separated epochs during the 5-year mission. The multi-epoch nature of the project will permit to detect and analyse variable sources whose number is currently estimated in the range of several tens of million, among the detectable sources. In this paper, we assess the performances of Gaia in analysing photometric periodic phenomena. We first present quickly the overall observational principle before discussing the implication of the scanning law in the time sampling. Then from extensive simulations one assesses the performances in the recovery of periodic signals as a function of the period, signal-to-noise ratio and position on the sky for simple sinusoidal variability.