Wednesday / 2 / Rabi’ Al-Thani / 1445 AH – 13:32 – Wednesday 18 October 2023 13:32
The Gaia space probe, dedicated to mapping the Milky Way Galaxy, recently presented its latest data, revealing half a million new stars and determining in an unprecedented way the locations of more than 150,000 asteroids.
The European Space Agency’s telescope, which has been operating 1.5 million kilometers from Earth for 10 years, provided in the third batch of its data in 2022 the locations and movements of more than 1.8 billion stars, giving a fairly complete three-dimensional view of our galaxy. .
But there were still “gaps because Gaia did not fully explore regions of the sky that are particularly dense with stars,” called globular clusters, the European Space Agency explained, on the occasion of the publication of an intermediate catalog – before the release of the fourth full catalog in 2025.
These clusters contain cores so bright that their light can “overwhelm telescopes trying to get a clear view,” and constitute “missing puzzle pieces in our maps of the universe,” the European Space Agency said in a statement.
The Gaia telescope chose the Omega Centauri group, which is the largest group that can be observed from Earth. It revealed more than half a million stars that had not been possible to observe before due to their close proximity to each other.
This result, which “exceeds expectations,” provides “a complete, large-scale map of Omega Centauri,” asserts Alexei Mints, co-author of the new publication and member of the European Gaia Consortium.
Since clusters are among the oldest objects in the universe, observing them is a crucial step for scientists who want to “confirm the age of our galaxy” or even determine its center, according to the European Space Agency.
Agence France-Presse International
