Context. We present the second Gaia data release, Gaia DR2, consisting of astrometry, photometry, radial velocities, and information on astrophysical parameters and variability, for sources brighter than magnitude 21. In addition epoch astrometry and photometry are provided for a modest sample of minor planets in the solar system. Aims. A summary of the contents of Gaia DR2 is presented, accompanied by a discussion on the differences with respect to Gaia DR1 and an overview of the main limitations which are still present in the survey. Recommendations are made on the responsible use of Gaia DR2 results. Methods. The raw data collected with the Gaia instruments during the first 22 months of the mission have been processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) and turned into this second data release, which represents a major advance with respect to Gaia DR1 in terms of completeness, performance, and richness of the data products. Results. Gaia DR2 contains celestial positions and the apparent brightness in G for approximately 1.7 billion sources. For 1.3 billion of those sources, parallaxes and proper motions are in addition available. The sample of sources for which variability information is provided is expanded to 0.5 million stars. This data release contains four new elements: broad-band colour information in the form of the apparent brightness in the GBP (330–680 nm) and GRP (630–1050 nm) bands is available for 1.4 billion sources; median radial velocities for some 7 million sources are presented; for between 77 and 161 million sources estimates are provided of the stellar effective temperature, extinction, reddening, and radius and luminosity; and for a pre-selected list of 14 000 minor planets in the solar system epoch astrometry and photometry are presented. Finally, Gaia DR2 also represents a new materialisation of the celestial reference frame in the optical, the Gaia-CRF2, which is the first optical reference frame based solely on extragalactic sources. There are notable changes in the photometric system and the catalogue source list with respect to Gaia DR1, and we stress the need to consider the two data releases as independent. Conclusions. Gaia DR2 represents a major achievement for the Gaia mission, delivering on the long standing promise to provide parallaxes and proper motions for over 1 billion stars, and representing a first step in the availability of complementary radial velocity and source astrophysical information for a sample of stars in the Gaia survey which covers a very substantial fraction of the volume of our galaxy.

Gaia is a cornerstone mission in the science programme of the European Space Agency (ESA). The spacecraft construction was approved in 2006, following a study in which the original interferometric concept was changed to a direct-imaging approach. Both the spacecraft and the payload were built by European industry. The involvement of the scientific community focusses on data processing for which the international Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) was selected in 2007. Gaia was launched on 19 December 2013 and arrived at its operating point, the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth-Moon system, a few weeks later. The commissioning of the spacecraft and payload was completed on 19 July 2014. The nominal five-year mission started with four weeks of special, ecliptic-pole scanning and subsequently transferred into full-sky scanning mode. We recall the scientific goals of Gaia and give a description of the as-built spacecraft that is currently (mid-2016) being operated to achieve these goals. We pay special attention to the payload module, the performance of which is closely related to the scientific performance of the mission. We provide a summary of the commissioning activities and findings, followed by a description of the routine operational mode. We summarise scientific performance estimates on the basis of in-orbit operations. Several intermediate Gaia data releases are planned and the data can be retrieved from the Gaia Archive, which is available through the Gaia home page.

Data Release 5 (DR5) of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) is the fifth data release from a magnitude-limited (9 < I < 12) survey of stars randomly selected in the southern hemisphere. The RAVE medium-resolution spectra (R ∼ 7500) covering the Ca-triplet region (8410-8795Å) span the complete time frame from the start of RAVE observations in 2003 to their completion in 2013. Radial velocities from 520 781 spectra of 457 588 unique stars are presented, of which 255 922 stellar observations have parallaxes and proper motions from the Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution (TGAS) in Gaia DR1. For our main DR5 catalog, stellar parameters (effective temperature, surface gravity, and overall metallicity) are computed using the RAVE DR4 stellar pipeline, but calibrated using recent K2 Campaign 1 seismic gravities and Gaia benchmark stars, as well as results obtained from highresolution studies. Also included are temperatures from the Infrared Flux Method, and we provide a catalogue of red giant stars in the dereddened color (J − Ks) 0 interval (0.50,0.85) for which the gravities were calibrated based only on seismology. Further data products for sub-samples of the RAVE stars include individual abundances for Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ti, Fe, and Ni, and distances found using isochrones. Each RAVE spectrum is complemented by an error spectrum, which has been used to determine uncertainties on the parameters. The data can be accessed via the RAVE Web site or the Vizier database.

Combining the precise parallaxes and optical photometry delivered by Gaia's second data release (Gaia DR2) with the photometric catalogues of Pan-STARRS1, 2MASS, and AllWISE, we derived Bayesian stellar parameters, distances, and extinctions for 265 million of the 285 million objects brighter than G = 18. Because of the wide wavelength range used, our results substantially improve the accuracy and precision of previous extinction and effective temperature estimates. After cleaning our results for both unreliable input and output data, we retain 137 million stars, for which we achieve a median precision of 5% in distance, 0.20 mag in Vband extinction, and 245 K in effective temperature for G ≤ 14, degrading towards fainter magnitudes (12%, 0.20 mag, and 245 K at G = 16; 16%, 0.23 mag, and 260 K at G = 17, respectively). We find a very good agreement with the asteroseismic surface gravities and distances of 7000 stars in the Kepler, K2-C3, and K2-C6 fields, with stellar parameters from the APOGEE survey, and with distances to star clusters. Our results are available through the ADQL query interface of the Gaia mirror at the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (gaia.aip.de) and as binary tables at data.aip.de. As a first application, we provide distanceand extinction-corrected colour-magnitude diagrams, extinction maps as a function of distance, and extensive density maps. These demonstrate the potential of our value-added dataset for mapping the three-dimensional structure of our Galaxy. In particular, we see a clear manifestation of the Galactic bar in the stellar density distributions, an observation that can almost be considered direct imaging of the Galactic bar.

We made new estimates of the Galactic escape speed at various Galactocentric radii using the latest data release of the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE DR4). Compared to previous studies we have a database that is larger by a factor of 10, as well as reliable distance estimates for almost all stars. Our analysis is based on statistical analysis of a rigorously selected sample of 90 highvelocity halo stars from RAVE and a previously published data set. We calibrated and extensively tested our method using a suite of cosmological simulations of the formation of Milky Way-sized galaxies. Our best estimate of the local Galactic escape speed, which we define as the minimum speed required to reach three virial radii R 340 , is 533 +54 −41 km s −1 (90% confidence), with an additional 4% systematic uncertainty, where R 340 is the Galactocentric radius encompassing a mean overdensity of 340 times the critical density for closure in the Universe. From the escape speed we further derived estimates of the mass of the Galaxy using a simple mass model with two options for the mass profile of the dark matter halo: an unaltered and an adiabatically contracted Navarro, Frenk & White (NFW) sphere. If we fix the local circular velocity, the latter profile yields a significantly higher mass than the uncontracted halo, but if we instead use the statistics for halo concentration parameters in large cosmological simulations as a constraint, we find very similar masses for both models. Our best estimate for M 340 , the mass interior to R 340 (dark matter and baryons), is 1.3 +0.4 −0.3 × 10 12 M (corresponds to M 200 = 1.6 +0.5 −0.4 × 10 12 M ). This estimate is in good agreement with recently published, independent mass estimates based on the kinematics of more distant halo stars and the satellite galaxy Leo I.