Double stars and astrometric uncertainties in Gaia DR1

Valeri V. Makarov, Claus Fabricius, Julien Frouard

Published 2017-04-02Version 1

A significant number of double stars with separations up to 2.5 arcsec are present in the Gaia Data Release 1 astrometric catalogs. Limiting our analysis to a well-studied sample of 1124 doubles resolved by Hipparcos, provided with individual Tycho component photometry, and cross-matched with the TGAS catalog, we estimate a rate of at least 3% for brighter double stars in Gaia DR1, which should be resolved in the future data releases. Gaia astrometric results are affected by unresolved duplicity. The variance-normalized quadratic differences of proper motion between Gaia and Hipparcos do not follow the expected chi^2 distribution and show signs of powerful degradation in the components aligned with the axes of the double systems. This concerns only pairs with separation below 1.2 -- 1.5 arcsec, which mostly remain unresolved in Gaia DR1. On the other hand, the orthogonal proper motion components and parallaxes do not have any detectable perturbation, as well as all astrometry for separations above 1.5 arcsec. Gaia parallaxes do not seem to be perturbed by duplicity, with Gaia - Hipparcos differences being systematically smaller than the expectation. The rate of incorrectly identified, or swapped, companions is estimated at 0.4%.