A Clear View of the Stars

[Recusant]

The Gaia mission has begun releasing its results. Below is an image of this first release.

"Gaia Mission Maps 1 Billion Stars" | Sky and Telescope

It's a gold mine of data that astronomers will be sifting through for decades to come, and it's just the beginning. At a press briefing in Madrid, Spain, European Space Agency (ESA) scientists presented the long-awaited first data release of the Gaia mission, containing accurate positions of roughly a billion stars in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. Never before have astronomers measured such a quantity of stars to such a high precision.

[Continues]

A story from the BBC on this data release:

Remarkably, scientists say the store of information even now is too big for them to sift, and they are appealing for the public's help in making discoveries.

To give one simple example of the scope of Gaia: Of the 1.1 billion light sources in Wednesday's data release, something like 400 million of these objects have never been recorded in any previous catalogue.

"You're imaging the whole sky in basically [Hubble] space telescope quality and because you can now resolve all the stars that previously maybe looked as though they were merged as one star at low resolution - now we can see them," explained Anthony Brown from Leiden University, Netherlands.

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There's also a web portal for Gaia itself: Gaia in the UK

[Icarus]

Stunning. Thank you Recusant.

[Magdalena]

A Clear View of the Stars