The Gaia house probe unveiled its newest discoveries on Jun. 13, 2022, in its quest to map the Milky Method intimately.
EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY/AFP through Getty Photographs
BERLIN — The European House Company launched a trove of information Monday on nearly 2 billion stars within the Milky Method, collected by its Gaia house observatory in an effort to create probably the most correct and full map of our galaxy.
Astronomers hope to make use of the info to know higher how stars are born and die, and the way the Milky Method advanced over billions of years.
The brand new knowledge consists of new info such because the age, mass, temperature and chemical composition of stars. This can be utilized, for instance, to find out which stars have been born in one other galaxy after which migrated to the Milky Method.
“That is an unimaginable gold mine for astronomy,” mentioned Antonella Vallenari, who helped lead a consortium of 450 scientists and engineers who spent years turning the measurements collected by the house probe into usable knowledge.
Gaia was additionally capable of detect greater than 100,000 starquakes, which the ESA likened to giant tsunamis that ripple throughout stars. They seem to make the celebrities blink and permit scientists to infer their density, inside rotation and inside temperature, astrophysicist Conny Aerts mentioned.
Though it has solely collected info on about 1% of the Milky Method’s stars, the Gaia mission is already offering the premise for round 1,600 scientific publications a yr.
Mission scientist Timo Prusti mentioned the sheer variety of stars noticed makes it extra possible that scientists will make very uncommon discoveries.
“You must observe a whole lot of objects to be able to get the needle within the haystack,” he mentioned.
ESA chief Josef Aschbacher mentioned having extra knowledge additionally permits astronomers to know among the forces at play within the galaxy, akin to the way in which our personal photo voltaic system is being thrown about contained in the Milky Method.
“It's enabling issues that will by no means be doable with out this huge variety of knowledge,” he mentioned.
The Gaia knowledge now being launched additionally consists of info on 800,000 binaries — stars that transfer in tandem with one another — in addition to a number of new exoplanets, a whole lot of 1000's of asteroids within the photo voltaic system and thousands and thousands of objects past our galaxy.
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