The European Space Agency has carried out a groundbreaking study on the Milky Way Galaxy. As part of the Gaia mission, the agency has released the most comprehensive data yet on 2 billion stars in our galaxy, described as a goldmine.
Astronomers hope to use the data to better understand how stars are born and die and how the Milky Way evolved over billions of years.
The new data includes new information such as the age, mass, temperature and chemical composition of stars. This can be used, for example, to determine which stars were born in another galaxy and migrated to the Milky Way.
GOLD MINE
“This is an incredible goldmine for astronomy,” said Antonella Vallenari, who helped lead a consortium of 450 scientists and engineers. said.
Gaia was also able to detect more than 100,000 so-called stellar earthquakes, which ESA likened to massive tsunamis rippling between stars. These allow scientists to infer the density, internal spin and temperature inside stars, astrophysicist Conny Aerts said.
Despite collecting information on only 1% of the stars of the Milky Way, the mission already forms the basis of approximately 1,600 scientific publications per year.
Timo Prusti, one of the scientists involved in the project, said that the large number of stars observed increases the possibility of scientists making very rare discoveries. “You have to observe a lot of objects to find the needle in the haystack,” Prusti said.
“These data are now enabling things that would never have been possible without data,” ESA chief Josef Aschbacher said in a statement on the data.
The currently released Gaia data also includes information on several new exoplanets, hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the solar system and millions of objects beyond our galaxy, as well as 800,000 binaries (stars moving in tandem with each other).
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