The Global Astrophysics Interferometer, also called the Gaia Observatory, will soon change our understanding of the Milky Way, says the European Space Agency (ESA), which launched the observatory in December 2013. Gaia was launched about a decade ago to create the largest, most resolution 3D Milky Way. by scanning about 1% of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy. In a recent update, the European Space Agency revealed that it will release its third complete dataset containing new and improved details of nearly two billion objects in our Milky Way galaxy on June 13.
What will Gaia reveal next?
Explaining what lies ahead in Treasure Gaia, the European Space Agency says the soon-to-be-released catalog will include new information on the chemical composition, stellar temperature, color, mass, age, and speed of stars drifting toward or away within the Milky Way. Go for a walk. The agency also said that the new data set would be the largest data set on a stranded binary star in our galaxy. In addition, the catalog also includes new information about thousands of objects such as asteroids and moons from the planets in our solar system as well as millions of galaxies and quasars outside the Milky Way.
According to NASA, a quasar is basically a very bright object at the center of a galaxy that emits strong radio bursts. Interestingly, the light emitted by quasars is so intense that it can exceed the combined brightness of all the stars in the galaxy. “In addition to the new data set, approximately fifty scientific papers will be published, nine of which are specifically dedicated to demonstrating the immense potential of the new Gaia data,” the European Space Agency said in a statement.
The new dataset will be released by the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), in collaboration with the ESA, which will be responsible for processing and analyzing Gaia data and catalog production. Notably, this will be the third release of the data set following the first and second releases on September 14, 2016 and April 25 in 2018, respectively.
More about Gaia’s mission
The Gaia Observatory is located at the second Lagrangian point (L2), 1.5 million km from Earth, after being launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket. This unique observatory weighing 2,029 kilograms entered service on July 25, 2014 to determine the formation, formation and evolution of galaxies. Gaia is equipped with two high-resolution telescopes that rotate every six hours and focus light on a single digital camera.
Designed to see one billion stars on average 70 times, Gaia’s first discovery was a supernova, Gaia14aaa, about 500 million light-years from Earth.
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