RGB photometric calibration of 15 million Gaia stars

Although a catalogue of synthetic RGB magnitudes, providing photometric data for a sample of 1346 bright stars, has been recently published, its usefulness is still limited due to the small number of reference stars available, considering that they are distributed throughout the whole celestial sphere, and the fact that they are restricted to Johnson V < 6.6 mag. This work presents synthetic RGB magnitudes for ∼15 million stars brighter than Gaia G = 18 mag, making use of a calibration between the RGB magnitudes of the reference bright star sample and the corresponding high-quality photometric G, GBP, and GRP magnitudes provided by the Gaia EDR3. The calibration has been restricted to stars exhibiting -0.5 < GBP - GRP < 2.0 mag, and aims to predict RGB magnitudes within an error interval of ±0.1 mag. Since the reference bright star sample is dominated by nearby stars with slightly undersolar metallicity, systematic variations in the predictions are expected, as modelled with the help of stellar atmosphere models. These deviations are constrained to the ±0.1-mag interval when applying the calibration only to stars scarcely affected by interstellar extinction and with metallicity compatible with the median value for the bright star sample. The large number of Gaia sources available in each region of the sky should guarantee high-quality RGB photometric calibrations. © 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.The authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Programa Estatal de I+D + i Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad under grant RTI2018-096188B-I00, which is partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), S2018/NMT-4291 (TEC2SPACE-CM), and ACTION, a project funded by the European Union H2020-SwafS-2018-1-824603. The participation of ICCUB researchers was (partially) supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and University (MICIU/FEDER, UE) through grant RTI2018095076-B-C21, and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences University of Barcelona (ICCUB, Unidad de Excelencia 'María de Maeztu') through grant CEX2019-000918-M. SB acknowledges Xunta de Galicia for financial support under grant ED431B 2020/29. The participation of ASdM was (partially) supported by the EMISSI@N project (NERC grant NE/P01156X/1). This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.With funding from the Spanish government through the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation SEV-2017-0709.Peer reviewe