Gaia DR2 quasar and galaxy classification

This has been achieved using a supervised classification method (Gaussian Mixture Models) based only on photometric and astrometric data (8 features) in Gaia-DR2. The model is trained empirically to classify objects into three classes - star, quasar, galaxy - for all objects with G>=14.5mag down to the Gaia magnitude limit of G=21.0mag.

We provide the probabilities for being a quasar (pqso) and a galaxy (pgal); the probability of being a star is pstar = 1-(pqso+pgal), and all other Gaia data can be obtained by cross-matching Gaia-DR2 using the source identifier. As our main goal is to identify extragalactic objects, we only report objects with pqso+pgal>0.5. These probabilities incorporate a sensible class prior, namely that quasars are 500 times rarer than stars, and that galaxies 7500 times rarer than stars.