April 2018 marks the 2nd data release (DR2) of the ESA Gaia space mission.
A new era in astrometry begun. Accurate positions, proper motions
and parallaxes for over a billion stars are now available on the
sub-mas level. The properties of DR2 will be explained in context
to pre-Gaia data and the final Gaia results expected in a few years.
The impact of Gaia reaches far into almost all of astronomy, and a
few examples will be given.