Today was the last day of the 2017 Heidelberg Gaia Sprint. Every participant prepared a single slide in a shared slide deck (available here), and had 120 seconds to present their results. Look at the slides for the full story, but it was really impressive! A few highlights for me were:
Rix and Fouesneau used common proper motions to match Gaia DR1 TGAS stars to much-fainter PanSTARRS companions, and found hundreds of white dwarf binaries, with a clear, complete white-dwarf sequence. Hawkins was able to separate red clump stars from other RGB stars with a data-driven spectral classifier, and to interpret it. Ting found similar, but working just with the spectral labels fit to spectra with physical models. El-Badry showed that stars he finds are binaries, spectroscopically (and he can find them even if the velocity differences vanish) are above the main sequence in the color—magnitude diagram.
Beaton showed that an old statistical-parallax calibration of RR Lyrae stars by Kollmeier turns out to be strongly confirmed in the TGAS data. Birky built a beautiful one-dimensional model of M-dwarf spectra in APOGEE using only a single label, which is literature spectral classifications. Burggraaff has a possible vertical-direction moving group coming through our local position in the Milky Way disk. Coronado found that she can calibrate main-sequence star luminosities using spectral labels to almost the quality of other standard candles. Rybizki made progress towards an empirical set of supernova yields, starting with APOGEE abundances and (poor) stellar ages.
And, as I have mentioned before, Casey showed that we might be able to do asteroseismology with Gaia, and Anderson made incredible maps of the Milky-Way disk (and animations of slices thereof!).
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