You Are Right here: Scientists Unveil Exact Map Of Extra Than A Billion Stars

Wednesday was the day astronomers stated goodbye to the outdated Milky Way that they had recognized and beloved and howdy to a brand new view of our house galaxy.

A European Space Agency mission known as Gaia simply launched a long-awaited treasure trove of information: exact measurements of 1.7 billion stars.

It’s unprecedented for scientists to know the precise brightness, distances, motions and colours of greater than a billion stars. The info will yield the very best three-dimensional map of our galaxy ever.

“This is a very big deal. I’ve been working on trying to understand the Milky Way and the formation of the Milky Way for a large fraction of my scientific career, and the amount of information this is revealing in some sense is thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times larger than any amount of information we’ve had previously,” stated David Hogg, an astrophysicist at New York University and the Flatiron Institute. “We’re really talking about an immense change to our knowledge about the Milky Way.”

The Gaia spacecraft launched in 2013 and is orbiting our solar, about one million miles away from Earth. Although it has surveyed an enormous variety of stars, Gaia is charting solely about 1 % of what’s on the market. The Milky Way accommodates round 100 billion stars

For 7 million stars, Gaia even has measurements displaying their velocity as they transfer towards or away from the spacecraft. “This is just a fantastic new addition,” stated Anthony Brown of the Netherlands’ Leiden University, with the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium.

In 2016, Gaia launched some preliminary outcomes however that was only a tease in contrast with Wednesday’s huge information dump. Astronomers around the globe have been planning the way to assault it for months, understanding that discoveries are simply ready in there for the taking.

“Enjoy it,” Antonella Vallenari, one other member of the consortium from the Astronomical Observatory of Padua in Italy, stated at a information convention as she introduced that the info was changing into out there.

The European group introduced new photos of our galaxy primarily based on some preliminary analyses of the info, together with little films that simulated what it could be wish to fly by the celebrities. “It’s not fake, it’s real measurements,” Brown stated. “We know exactly where the stars are.”

Scientists around the globe who have been watching the occasion on-line struggled to take all of it in. “This is like massive scientific progress and we were blinked an image,” stated Jackie Faherty, an astronomer on the American Museum of Natural History, one in all greater than a dozen astronomers who wakened earlier than daybreak and gathered collectively on the Flatiron Institute in New York City to observe.

Then it was time to play, because the scientists bent their heads over their laptops and tried to obtain information. Researchers expect a slew of discoveries within the coming hours and days, however analyses will go on for years and even many years.

“This is the data we’re going to be working on for the rest of my career. Probably no data set will rival this,” Faherty stated. “It’s the excitement of the day that we see it. It’s why we were up at 5 a.m. to get here. It’s exciting to be around each other and trying to get the data all at once. It’s a day we’re going to remember.”

Copyright 2025 NPR