The Gaia space probe, dedicated to mapping the Milky Way Galaxy, 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 the Gaia probe did not fully explore regions of the sky particularly dense with stars,” called globular clusters, the European Space Agency explained, on the occasion of the publication of an intermediate booklet, before the release of the fourth complete “catalog” in 2017. 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.
