Distribution of the first significant digit of the Gaia DR2 parallaxes together with the theoretical prediction of Benford’s law. Blue points refer to negative parallaxes (for which the statistics is based on the absolute value of the parallaxes), green points refer to positive parallaxes, and red points refer to the absolute value of all parallaxes (the red data can hence be considered as a weighted mean of the blue and green data with weights 18% and 82%, respectively). The data have vertical error bars to reflect Poisson statistics, but the error bars are much smaller than the symbol sizes.