The Gaia Science Alerts project (GSA) aims to augment a precision survey of the Milky Way with a controlled, precision survey of all classes of transient phenomena. While onboard BP/RP spectra from Gaia will ultimately allow us to classify many Gaia Alerts based on Gaia data alone, in the initial phases of the GSA project it is necessary to verify and classify discoveries with ground-based spectroscopic followup. In this article, we describe a subset of the ongoing Gaia Alerts followup programmes, and some of the initial science results from this work.

The Gaia Photometric Science Alerts (GSA) group is the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) unit responsible for releasing alerts on Gaia transient candidates from a daily flow of initially reduced data. In preparation for obtaining the rates for different transient families with Gaia, one of the main goals of GSA is to reliably identify and characterize the candidates. In this article, we describe the simulations used to understand and predict possible selection effects and the techniques used to identify the nature of the transient alerts provided by Gaia.