The European Space Agency has presented a three-dimensional map of 1 billion stars of our galaxy, the Milky Way. That is, it is a map 1,000 times more complete than any of the existing ones so far.
To achieve this, the Gaia space probe, launched in December 2013, has been circling the Sun 1.5 million kilometers, beyond the orbit of the Earth and has been – discreetly – taking pictures of the Milky Way during this journey.
Thanks to its colossal 1 billion pixel camera, arguably the largest in space, this satellite’s camera is so powerful that it would be able to measure the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometers, thereby Nearby stars have been located with unprecedented precision.
The mission, which has lasted for 5 years, has allowed the location of 1,000 million stars; however, this is just 1% of the estimated stellar population of the Milky Way, whose stars are scattered over a region 100,000 light-years across.
The Gaia mission maps the position of the stars in our galaxy in two ways: not only does it pinpoint their location, but since the probe has observed each star about 70 times over the past 5 years, it can also trace their movement . Thanks to this, scientists will be able to calculate the distance between the Earth and each of the stars.
This mission will reveal thousands of new worlds and scientists have tons of data to analyze as it collects 40 gigs of data a day.
” Gaia is going to revolutionize what we know about the stars and the galaxy,” says David Hogg, an astronomer at New York University (USA).
“The beautiful map that we publish today shows the density of stars measured by Gaia throughout the sky and confirms the quality of the data collected during its first year of operations,” says Timo Prusti, ESA’s Gaia program scientist.
It is clear that this huge stellar census will provide us with the necessary information to solve unknowns about the origin, structure and historical evolution of the Milky Way.
This map shows the density of stars observed by Gaia in each portion of the sky. The brightest regions indicate the densest concentrations of stars, while the darkest regions correspond to the areas where the fewest stars are observed.
