Comparing Gaia, NED, and SIMBAD source classifications in nearby galaxies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) provides the first classifications for the sources in Gaia’s all-sky database. Most Gaia sources are stars in the Milky Way, but DR3 also contains many sources that belong to nearby galaxies, as well as background galaxies and quasars. In this work, we compare the Gaia classifications from the Discrete Source Classifier (CU8-DSC) module to the more detailed and heterogeneous classifications in NED (NASA Extragalactic Database) and/or SIMBAD (Set of Identifications, Measurements and Bibliography for Astronomical Data) for sources with sky positions within twice the Holmberg radius of nearby galaxies. Matching these catalogues gives approximately $3.2\times 10^5$ unique Gaia matches for $4\times 10^5$ sources over 1040 galaxies (excluding some large Local Group galaxies) in the Local Volume Galaxy catalogue. Matched sources contain a lower fraction of Gaia-classified stars and higher fractions of galaxies and quasars ($\sim 95$ per cent, 2 per cent, and 2 per cent, respectively) than DR3 overall. Considering NED (SIMBAD) classifications as truth values, the balanced accuracy of Gaia classification is 0.80 (0.83): the most common disagreements are literature-classified galaxies Gaia-classified as stars and literature-classified stars Gaia-classified as quasars. Purity (P) and completeness (C) metrics show that agreement between Gaia classification and NED/SIMBAD classification is best for stars ($P\, \mathrm{ and}\, C\sim 0.9$), and decreases for quasars ($P\lt 0.3$ and $0.7\lt C\lt 0.8$), galaxies ($0.7\lt P\lt 0.8$ and $0.3\lt C\lt 0.6$), white dwarfs ($0.04\lt P\lt 0.6$ and $C\sim 0.6$), and binary stars ($P\, \mathrm{ and}\, C\lt 0.1$). NED or SIMBAD sources classified only by detection wavelength are most often Gaia-classified as stars, while non-stellar components of galaxies appear in all Gaia classes.