PARIS – On Monday, the Gaia space probe announced its newest findings in its effort to map the Milky Way in unprecedented detail, examining nearly two million stars and revealing unexplained "starquakes" that sweep across the blazing giants like gigantic tsunamis.
The third data collection from the mission, which will be given at 1000 GMT to eagerly awaiting astronomers around the world, "revolutionises our understanding of the galaxy," according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
"It's the Swiss Army knife of astrophysics," said Francois Mignard, a member of the Gaia team. "There isn't a single astronomer who doesn't use its data, directly or indirectly."
Some of the map's new discoveries are close to home, such as a database of over 156,000 asteroids in our Solar System "whose orbits the device has computed with unparalleled precision," according to Mignard.
Gaia, on the other hand, can look beyond the Milky Way, detecting 2.9 million additional galaxies and 1.9 million quasars, which are the astonishingly luminous centres of galaxies fueled by supermassive black holes.
Since its launch by the European Space Agency in 2013, the Gaia spacecraft has been tucked in a strategically positioned orbit 1.5 million kilometres (937,000 miles) from Earth, where it has been studying the skies.
"Gaia sweeps the sky and picks up whatever it sees," said Paris Observatory astronomer Misha Haywood. However, it can only detect around 1% of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which spans 100,000 light years.
The probe has two telescopes and a billion-pixel camera that can collect images clear enough to measure the diameter of a human hair from 1,000 kilometres away. It also contains a variety of other devices that allow it to not only map but also measure the movement, chemical composition, and ages of the stars.
"For the first time," Haywood said, "it enables a global observation of the positions of anything that moves in the sky." Prior to Gaia, "we had a really constrained perspective of the galaxy." It also displays the vast range of variances that exist among stars.
"Our galaxy is a wonderful melting pot of stars," Alejandra Recio-Blanco, a Gaia member, remarked.
"This diversity is really important because it teaches us about the creation of our galaxy," he explained. "It also plainly demonstrates that our Sun, like us, is part of an ever-changing system generated by the collision of stars and gas from various sources."
0 Comments