Congrats and thanks! A very interesting read. And the Gaia mission is so damn cool. A compass and map to inform and recommend potential other missions. The Sagan Summer Workshop on Gaia was very accessible: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIbTYGsIVYti7z5CHoiS5BJlT11gHUtgt

Perhaps it's just a small black hole in a small solar system that eventually devoured up everything in its neighborhood, leaving nothing to accelerate from its polar jets. You'd expect a black hole formation to be violent and leave remnants, but if it happened so long ago that the remnants were all eventually devoured or flung off, it might just be alone in dark. Is the companion very old?

Does the Gaia data show it having a trajectory moving with the galaxy or "through" it? Perhaps it happened elsewhere and the remnants were left behind in some ejection event that stripped the system of its lighter elements and sent the more massive objects tumbling through the galaxy.

I love how the Gaia data just keeps building on itself. And the next release is expected to dump something like 10,000 exoplanet candidates. That's huge...

What statements are you specifically referring to? Science is the practice of skepticism and doubt, especially of oneself. But the very measured and precise language of analysis is not friendly to presentation, hence journalism often translating it into something less measured and precise. Acknowledge that science journalism and science have very different goals and are not perfect translations. Consider whether your perceived issue is with the journalistic representation or the science itself. Click all the way through past the journalism into the research itself before presuming much about the claims or phrasing of the science based solely on the journalistic representation of it.