The third Gaia Challenge workshop will take place at the Institut de Ciències del Cosmos de la Universitat de Barcelona ( ICCUB - IEEC) in Barcelona, Spain, August 31st – September 4th 2015 (Mon-Fri).

The aim of this workshop is to prepare the exploitation of Gaia data, the first release of which will be in about one year ( Gaia releases ). The format, as previously, is that participants are invited to apply their favorite techniques to mock data in an effort to recover underlying physical quantities, like the gravitational potential and the phase-space structure of stars. The mock data will be distributed in advance, and the workshop itself is focused in comparing and discussing results, honing the various techniques, and building collaborations. The challenges are divided into five broad categories. All of them continue from the previous workshops held in Surrey, UK, and Heidelberg, Germany. For the present edition, two groups have been enlarged to include the task to build the “3D extinction map ” and to discuss on powerful and robust statistical techniques to achieve “the stellar luminosity calibration” in the Gaia era.

The five modules with their coordinators are:

1. Spherical & Triaxial (Justin Read, justin.inglis.read AT gmail.com)
2. Discs & Extinction Map(Daisuke Kawata, d.kawata AT ucl.ac.uk)
3. Streams & Halo Stars (Andreea Font, A.S.Font AT ljmu.ac.uk & Andreas Kuepper, ahwkuepper AT gmail.com)
4. Collisional Systems (Mark Gieles, m.gieles AT surrey.ac.uk & Vincent Henault-Brunet v.henault-brunet AT surrey.ac.uk)
5. Stellar Parameters (Rene Andrae, andrae AT mpia.de)

Most of the time during the week is dedicated to working on the challenges in groups of 10-20 people per module.

The program will be available through this link: programme The list of participants will be available through this link: participants

For logistic information follow this link: logistics.

The first Gaia Challenge workshop took place on August 19th - 23th at the University of Surrey, UK and was kindly supported by the Gaia Research for Europe Astronomy Training network.

The second Gaia Challenge workshop took place on October 27th-31st 2014 at the Max Plank Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, within the Collaborative Research Center SFB881 "The Milky Way System".

For further information, please see previous workshops.