Gaia, Fundamental Physics, and Dark Matter

Abstract

The Gaia space astrometry mission is measuring accurate distances and space motions of more than two billion stars throughout our galaxy and beyond. This is a first look at how Gaia is contributing to fundamental physics, and in particular to our understanding of dark matter, for which a few examples are given from the current literature. One of our goals is to illustrate how deep and often surprising insight into very diverse areas of fundamental physics can be extracted from this new and enormous high-accuracy stellar data set. In this spirit, we finish by suggesting a search for a connection between stellar activity, dark matter streams, and planetary configuration in nearby exoplanetary systems, as has been tentatively proposed in the case of the solar system. Dark matter candidates that could be probed by such a test include anti-quark nuggets, which have also been postulated as a possible explanation of the anomalous heating of the solar corona, and of the matter–antimatter asymmetry in the universe.