Gaia space telescope completes mapping of the Milky Way – 10/10/2023 – Science
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The Gaia space telescope, which maps the Milky Way, delivered its latest data, which revealed half a million new stars and unprecedentedly indicates the position of more than 150,000 asteroids.
The European Space Agency (ESA) telescope, which has been operating for ten years at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, provided in its third cataloging of 2022 the positions and movements of more than 1.8 billion stars, offering a very complete third-dimensional view of our galaxy.
However, “gaps still remained, as Gaia has not fully explored the particularly star-dense areas of the sky”, called globular clusters, explained ESA on the occasion of the publication of an intermediate catalogue, ahead of the fourth full catalog at the end of 2025.
Omega Centauri cluster
Image compares two views of the star cluster Omega Centauri, which appears as a collection of bright stars on a dark background. On the left, the roughly circular cluster looks like a donut with an empty center. On the right, this void has been filled with so many stars present that the core appears to be almost solidly bright rather than being made up of individual stars – ESA/Gaia/DPAC
These globular clusters have cores so bright that their light can blind telescopes trying to get a clear view and are “the missing pieces of the puzzle of our maps of the universe,” the agency said in a statement.
The Gaia mission selected as its object of analysis the Omega Centauri cluster, the largest that can be observed from Earth. And it revealed more than half a million stars in its formation that had not yet been observed, as they were too close to each other.
The result, which “exceeds expectations”, offers a “complete large-scale map of Omega Centauri”, highlights Alexey Mints, co-author of the publication and member of the European Gaia consortium.
As clusters are among the oldest objects in the universe, their observation is a crucial step for scientists, who want to “confirm the age of our galaxy” or locate its center, according to ESA.
Another novelty is that the Gaia telescope determined the position of more than 156,000 asteroids in the Solar System that are located in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, or further away, such as the Trojan asteroids from Jupiter.
Thanks to a long observation time (66 months, twice as long as previously), the probe calculated its orbital period with an accuracy “100 to 200 times better” than terrestrial telescopes, said François Mignard, the mission’s chief scientist. Gaia at the National Center for Space Studies (CNES).
The orbits of large asteroids such as Ceres, Hygiea or Metis have been almost completely measured, which makes it possible to “refine the predictions and probabilities of a future approach or collision with Earth”, said Mignard.
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