The ESA Gaia’s Stellar Family Portrait visualisation is an exploration of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, a fundamental tool in astronomy, using data from the second data release of ESA’s Gaia mission. The second Gaia data release was made public on 25 April 2018. Learn more about Gaia: sci.esa.int/gaia.

The Gaia data is the product of a vast human collaboration: the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), a large pan-European team of about 450 scientists and software developers who are entrusted with the complex task of analysing and processing the satellite data to produce the Gaia catalogues.

The ESA Gaia’s Stellar Family Portrait visualisation was developed for the European Space Agency by Jan Willem Tulp (TULP interactive) with support from Jos de Bruijne (ESA), Claudia Mignone (ATG Europe for ESA) and Tineke Roegiers (HE Space for ESA). Acknowledgement: Karen O’Flaherty (EJR-Quartz for ESA).

All image credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. The all-sky images shown in this visualisation were produced by A. Moitinho / A. F. Silva / M. Barros / C. Barata, University of Lisbon, Portugal; H. Savietto, Fork Research, Portugal.

The cluster data shown in the visualisation were provided by Carine Babusiaux, Floor van Leeuwen, and co-authors of the paper "Gaia Data Release 2: Observational Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams”.

The stellar evolution tracks are based on the Padova database of stellar evolutionary tracks and isochrones produced by Léo Girardi, INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Italy, and collaborators.

The ESA Gaia's Stellar Family Portrait builds on the ESA Star Mapper visualisation, an earlier project which provides an exploration of data from Gaia's predecessor, the Hipparcos mission: sci.esa.int/star_mapper.

V1.0 – Release date 14 May 2018