Gaia@home

Gaia@home is a volunteer distributed computing project that needs your to help scientists access the BOINC platform to analyze Gaia data.

Why Gaia@home?

The Gaia@home project is designed to give scientists another layer of freedom. The project allows computations which demand a lot of CPU time – reducing the computational workload and opening up opportunities for heavy processing operations on volunteers computers.

Goal

To create a huge number of small jobs (Gaia data + code), and send them to the BOINC platform to collect the results for further analysis.

Subprojects

Long period comets

Calculating long-period comet orbits under the simultaneous Galactic and stellar perturbations. (N-body problem with N of the order of 400).

more details: Królikowska, M and Dybczynski, P.A., 2020: The catalogue of cometary orbits and their dynamical evolution

Orbital changes of C/2002 T7 projected on its original orbit plane that described by five snapshots in CODE catalogue. Red line depicts the past motion of this comet while the blue line depicts its future evolution. Five epochs (snapshots) when orbital elements are recorded are marked: 1 - osculating heliocentric orbit near the centre of the observational interval (typically near the perihelion); 2 - original barycentric orbit recorded in the past at 250 au from the Sun; 3 - future barycentric orbit recorded in the future at 250 au from the Sun; 4 - previous orbit, recorded at the previous perihelion; 5 - next orbit, in this case recorded at the escape border at 120 000 au from the Sun, but for many other comets recorded in the next perihelion.

Stellar close approaches

To investigate the proximity parameters and the influence of the close approach of stars on the basis of Gaia DR2 and DR3. Using a numerical integration in an axisymmetric Galactic model, we determine new parameters of the close encounter for stars. Adding ten thousand clones drawn with the use of a covariance matrix, we estimate the most probable position and velocity of stars at the minimum distance from the Sun.

more details: Berski, F and Dybczynski, P.A., 2020: Close approach parameters recalculated based on the first Gaia data release

Project team / Sponsors

Astronomical Observatory Institute, Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University

Contributing

If you're interested in supporting this project, download and install BOINC and attach to the project using its official URL: https://gaiaathome.eu/gaiaathome/.