![]() ![]() This enables scientists to track stars’ nearly imperceptible motions across the Galaxy year after year. The European Space Agency (ESA) probe continuously scans the sky as it slowly spins on itself, and it has now measured the positions of the same stars multiple times. Gaia lifted off in late 2013, and began observing stars in July 2014 from a perch 1.5 million kilometres from Earth. “My group is ready to go and very excited to find out what is there to discover and learn about the Milky Way.” Using data that Gaia released in 2018, Helmi and her collaborators have studied the motions of large numbers of stars to reveal evidence of galactic mergers that happened billions of years in the past.īillion-star map of Milky Way set to transform astronomy “I am yet to see another project in astronomy - or any science - that has had such an impact on such a short timescale,” says Amina Helmi, an astronomer at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The data will underpin studies that range from the origins and evolution of the Galaxy to locating its dark matter. The latest update from the Gaia space observatory - which is tracking more than 1 billion stars in the Galaxy - provides not just a static image, but a moving picture of how stars will shift over time. The best available map of the Milky Way just got better.
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