Information on resource 'Geometric and photogeometric distances to 1.47 billion stars in Gaia Early Data Release 3 (eDR3)'

We estimate the distance from the Sun to sources in Gaia eDR3 that have parallaxes. We provide two types of distance estimate, together with their corresponding asymmetric uncertainties, using Bayesian posterior density functions that we sample for each source. Our prior is based on a detailed model of the 3D spatial, colour, and magnitude distribution of stars in our Galaxy that includes a 3D map of interstellar extinction.

The first type of distance estimate is purely geometric, in that it only makes use of the Gaia parallax and parallax uncertainty. This uses a direction-dependent distance prior derived from our Galaxy model. The second type of distance estimate is photogeometric: in addition to parallax it also uses the source's G-band magnitude and BP-RP colour. This type of estimate uses the geometric prior together with a direction-dependent and colour-dependent prior on the absolute magnitude of the star.

Our distance estimate and uncertainties are quantiles, so are invariant under logarithmic transformations. This means that our median estimate of the distance can be used to give the median estimate of the distance modulus, and likewise for the uncertainties.

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