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You cannot simply drive a Google Maps automotive across the Milky Way to diagram it. It’s lucky, then, that new info gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory gives probably the most detailed map but of the galaxy. The map includes nearly 2 billion stars and it helps the company hint the Milky Way’s historical past.
“The new Gaia data promise to be a treasure trove for astronomers,” Jos de Bruijne, ESA’s Gaia deputy challenge scientist, stated in a assertion.
The new info not solely brings the overall quantity of stars mapped over seven years as much as near 2 billion, but it surely includes “a detailed census of more than 300,000 stars in our cosmic neighborhood,” that means stars inside 326 light-years of the solar. That 300,000 quantity is believed to be 92% of the stars in that space. That’s 100 occasions extra stars than the previous knowledge, which dates again to 1991.
The new knowledge offers location, movement and brightness measurements which might be “orders of magnitude” extra precise than the previous info. In reality, the info is so exact it is revealed that the solar’s path is not a straight line, however barely curved.
“Gaia has been staring at the heavens for the past seven years, mapping the positions and velocities of stars,” stated Caroline Harper, head of area science on the UK Space Agency. “Thanks to its telescopes, we have in our possession today the most detailed billion-star 3D atlas ever assembled.”
The new map helps astronomers make predictions, envisioning the actions of 40,000 stars 1.6 million years into the long run, the company experiences.
This week’s launch is the primary of two elements, with the second anticipated in 2022. Gaia’s “stellar census” started in 2013.
(This story has not been edited by Newslivenation employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)