The Etopa Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft unveiled its latest discovery Monday (13/6) in an effort to map the galaxy. Milky Way more detail than never before.
The ESA research team observed nearly two million stars and uncovered a mysterious ‘star quake’, which swept across the fiery giant like a tsunami.
According to the research team ESAthe third mission data set released by Gaia is said to be a revolution in understanding the Milky Way galaxy.
“This is the Swiss Army’s knife of astrophysics – there isn’t a single astronomer who hasn’t used his data, either directly or indirectly,” said Dr Francois Mignard, a member of the Gaia team.
This reveals new insights close to the Milky Way, collected in the form of a catalog containing more than 156,000 asteroids in our solar system ‘whose orbits have been instrument calculated with unmatched precision’, Mignard said.
Gaia further saw that beyond the Milky Way there are 2.9 million other galaxies, as well as 1.9 very bright quasars or heart galaxies.
The Gaia spacecraft is in a strategically positioned orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where it has been observing the sky since its launch by ESA in 2013.
Star melting place
Paris Observatory astronomer Misha Haywood said Gaia scanned the sky and captured everything it saw.
But it can still only detect about one percent of the stars in the Milky Way, which is about 100 thousand light-years away.
There is a Probe equipped with two telescopes and a one billion pixel camera, to capture images sharp enough to measure the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometers.
Gaia also has a variety of other instruments that not only map the stars, but also measure their movement, chemical composition, and age.
Haywood said prior to Gaia, astronomers had limited views of galaxies, but ‘This provides global observations of the position of anything moving in the sky, for the first time’.
shock earthquake
The observation of ‘stellar earthquakes’, or large tremors changing the shape of distant stars, is ‘one of the most surprising discoveries’ in recent data.
Gaia wasn’t created to observe stellar earthquakes, but rather detects strange phenomena in thousands of stars, including some that shouldn’t be visible.
“Gaia is opening a gold mine for massive star ‘asteroseismology’,” said Gaia member Conny Aerts.
About 50 scientific papers were published alongside the new data, with more expected in the coming years. Gaia’s observations sparked thousands of studies since its first dataset was released in 2016.
A second data set in 2018 allowed astronomers to show the Milky Way joined other galaxies in a violent collision, which occurred about 10 billion years ago.
The raw data stream was sifted through by a team of 450 European scientists and software engineers using six supercomputers and ‘human-driven algorithms’ as part of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium.
It took the team five years to deliver the most recent data, which was observed from 2014 to 2017.
“We can’t wait for the astronomy community to dive into our new data to learn more about our galaxy and its surroundings than we ever could have imagined,” said ESA’s Gaia project scientist Timo Prusti.
The final data set will be released in 2030, after Gaia completes its mission of surveying the sky and the Milky Way in 2025, according to Strait Times.
(can/fea)
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