The binarity of young stars as traced by Gaia

Over the past years it has emerged that the binarity of massive stars may significantly affect their evolution and properties; massive Main Sequence stars have a binary fraction close to 100%, while 70% of these have sufficiently small separations for interactions to occur. This will significantly affect their further evolution. If we are to understand the evolution and fate of massive stars therefore, we need to understand how their binarity came to be. Thus, an important question is how these binaries were formed and evolved. To do so we need to go to the earliest stages in the lives of stars to study the proto- binaries. However, especially for those all important massive stars, not much data is known on their early binarity. In this project we will use data from the revolutionary Gaia telescope and its upcoming 2021 Data Release 3 in particular to search for, identify and characterize the binarity from an existing sample of known, young Pre-Main Sequence stars. In addition, Machine Learning techniques will be used to further explore the gigantic Gaia database and discover new such objects.