[ANN]: Kick-off of GREAT working group on Stellar Variability with Gaia



GREAT (Gaia Research for European Astronomy Training) is an approved European Science Foundation (ESF) network programme that aims to build scientific collaborations across Europe to exploit the avalanche of Gaia data, and to deliver the major scientific advances around the main objectives of Gaia. The programme will provide funding for training events, workshops, major conferences, proceedings, grants for short and exchange visits, and outreach material.

Already about 90 research groups from 17 countries across Europe have shown interest to participate in this large network. GREAT defines several working groups, including a working group dedicated to stellar variability. Gaia is predicted to discover millions of new variable stars, for which it not only will provide photometric time series, but also their 3D position in our Milky Way.

The goals of this working group are to explore which synergies exist between the different research groups, to define and to set up new collaborations that will optimally exploit the Gaia data, to discuss and prepare for complementary ground-based follow-up, and to define interesting workshops, training events and/or conferences related to Gaia and stellar variability for the coming years.

Researchers from European institutes interested in participating in this working group, are invited to email their name and institute to the WG's co-facilitator Joris De Ridder (joris@ster.kuleuven.ac.be). 

Relevant links:

GREAT: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/GREAT/index.html
GAIA: http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120377_index_0_m.html

Weblink:

Email: joris@ster.kuleuven.ac.be