More than a billion stars mapped in Milky Way

The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has released its first set of data, resulting in the assembly of the most detailed 3D map of the Milky Way ever.

“Gaia is going to be extremely useful for exoplanets, and especially systems that have the Jupiter kind of planets”, said ESA Gaia project scientist, Timo Prusti.

“Today’s release gives us a first impression of the extraordinary data that await us and that will revolutionize our understanding of how stars are distributed and move across our Galaxy”, Gimenez said in a statement on Wednesday.

The space telescope was launched in 2013 and began collecting data in 2014.

At a press conference today in Madrid, Spain, ESA officials revealed examples of the work already undertaken by ESA’s Gaia satellite, as the first batch of data was released to the astronomical community.

According to the ESA, Gaia’s ultimate goal is to chart the positions, distances and motion of around 1 per cent of the stars in the Milky Way.

However, this does not mean the map will be limited for astronomy with one of the Gaia team members, Francois Mignard, describing the new map as opening a “new chapter in astronomy”.

At the heart of the five-year mission is the 10-meter (33-foot)-wide Gaia spacecraft, which resembles a barrel sitting on a saucer.

Both types of data will be available for more than two million stars, and by the end of 2017, Gaia will have done the same for a billion.

While this may be the biggest and most ambitious galaxy-mapping endeavor yet, the vast amount of stars observed in this mission will represent only about 1 percent of all of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

By combining Gaia data with information from these less precise catalogues, it was possible to start disentangling the effects of “parallax” and “proper motion” even from the first year of observations only. The relationship between the brightness and pulsation periods of these stars will be better calibrated which can be applied to stars beyond the Milky Way.

Gaia is the most precise measuring machine ever built.

It’s so powerful, in fact, that it could resolve the width of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometres. Here the sun and Earth’s gravity are always in balance, allowing a comparatively small object (like Gaia) to stay in the same place relative to these two celestial bodies. And yet, to catalogue the stars in the galaxy, you might look at everything simultaneously. Intrepid spacefarers who’d like to zip off to the action-packed galactic plane can see it depicted here as a bright streak, running horizontally across the Milky Way’s midsection. What might we learn from this trove of new data?

The satellite has a camera with a resolution of one billion pixels.