Abstract

The goal of the school is to introduce the utilisation of Gaia data in different scientific fields including hands-on and excercises with the real data of the first full Gaia data set DR2 (published in April 2018). We like to bring together five external teachers and a few locals to present different aspects of the scientific application of the data. The second data release DR2 of Gaia provides positions, colours, parallaxes and proper motions for more than a billion stars. For the brighter stars radial velocities, extinction and a spectral classification are also provided. Additional information about variability and transient phenomena including the effect of General Relativity on the observations is available. These data allow a big leap forward in many and very diverse fields of research. The school will look at the data structure and tailored methods of data analysis and data mining. We will discuss how Gaia data can be used for a range of scientific topics. The emphasis of the summer school will be on merging practical methodology and solving real-world problems to address questions like: What can we learn from Gaia data in different research fields? How do we select Gaia data efficiently for a given problem? How should we handle errors and correlations? How can we visualize the structure of data and the results?