The catalogue of radial velocity standard stars for Gaia
Résumé
The Radial Velocity Spectrograph (RVS) on board of Gaia needs to be calibrated using stable reference stars known in advance. A catalogue has being built for that purpose, including 1420 radial velocity standard star candidates selected on strict criteria in order to fulfill the Gaia-RVS requirements. We have undertaken a large programme of ground based observations in 2006 to monitor these stars and verify their stability which has to be better than 300 m s^{-1} over several years. We report 6536 radial velocity measurements for the 1420 stars. For a mean time baseline of 5.9 years, nearly 95% of the candidates (1394 stars) fulfill the stability criterion of 300 m s^{-1}. 80.4% have a stability better than 100 m s^{-1}. We compared our measurements to other sources.