Benfords law in the Gaia universe
  Benfords law states that for scale- and base-invariant data sets covering a
wide dynamic range, the distribution of the first significant digit is biased
towards low values. This has been shown to be true for wildly different
datasets, including financial, geographical, and atomic data. In astronomy,
earlier work showed that Benfords law also holds for distances estimated as the
inverse of parallaxes from the ESA Hipparcos mission. We investigate whether
Benfords law still holds for the 1.3 billion parallaxes contained in the second
data release of Gaia (Gaia DR2). In contrast to previous work, we also include
negative parallaxes. We examine whether distance estimates computed using a
Bayesian approach instead of parallax inversion still follow Benfords law.
Lastly, we investigate the use of Benfords law as a validation tool for the
zero-point of the Gaia parallaxes.
