Berlin, June 13 (US): The European Space Agency has released a set of data on nearly two billion stars in the Milky Way, collected by the Gaia mission in an effort to create the most accurate and complete map of our galaxy.
Astronomers hope to use the data to better understand how stars are born and die, and how the Milky Way has evolved over billions of years, AP reports.
The new data includes new information such as the age, mass, temperature and chemical composition of the stars.
This can be used, for example, to identify stars that were born in another galaxy and then migrated to the Milky Way.
“This is an amazing goldmine for astronomy,” said Antonella Valinari, who helped lead a consortium of 450 scientists and engineers who have spent years converting measurements collected by the probe into usable data.
Gaia has also been able to detect more than 100,000 so-called starquakes, which the European Space Agency (ESA) has likened to large tsunamis that ripple through the stars.
This allows scientists to infer density, internal rotation and temperature inside stars, astrophysicist Connie Aerts said.
Although it has collected information on only about 1% of the Milky Way’s stars, the mission already provides the basis for about 1,600 scientific publications annually.
Project scientist Timo Prusti said that the huge number of observed stars makes it more likely that scientists will make very rare discoveries.
“You have to watch a lot of things in order to get the needle in the haystack,” he said.
Having more data also allows astronomers to understand some of the forces at play in the galaxy, such as the way our solar system is cast inside the Milky Way, said ESA chief Joseph Asbacher.
The Gaia data now being released also includes information on 800,000 binaries — stars that move alongside each other — as well as many new exoplanets, hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the solar system, and millions of objects outside our galaxy.
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