Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2011
The ESA Gaia mission will provide a multi-epoch database for a billion of objects,including variable objects that comprise stars, active galactic nuclei and asteroids. Wehighlight a few of Gaia’s properties that will benefit the study of variable objects, andillustrate with two examples the work being done in the preparation of the data processingand object characterization. The first example relates to the analysis of the nearlysimultaneous multi-band data of Gaia with the Principal Component Analysis techniques, andthe second example concerns the classification of Gaia time series into variability types.The results of the ground-based processing of Gaia’s variable objects data will be madeavailable to the scientific community through the intermediate and final ESA releasesthroughout the mission.