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One Billion Stars Mapped: The Mission Of The Gaia Space Telescope

By Robert Bellach
Published on: 07:43 PST, Sep 15, 2016

One billion stars mapped: That’s the mission of the Gaia space telescope, from the European Space Agency. Yesterday, the Agency released the first set of data from Gaia, BBC News reports. BBC Science correspondent Jonathan Amos calls it “the most precise map of the night sky ever assembled.” Gaia has so far recorded “the position and brightness of over a billion stars.” The “mapping effort is already unprecedented in scale, but it still has several years to run.”

“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.”

In a London presentation summarizing the day, the Gaia mission was described boldly as marking that “the Galactic science revolution has begun.”

Amos goes on to explain another intriguing possibility that could be delved into with Gaia.

“One eagerly anticipated measurement is the radial velocity of stars. This describes the movement they make towards or away from Gaia as they turn around the galaxy. If this measurement is combined with the stars’ proper motion, it will lay bare the dynamics of the Milky Way. It should be possible, for example, to make a kind of time-lapse movie – to run forwards to see how the galaxy might evolve into the future, or to run backwards to see how our cosmic neighbourhood came to be the shape it is today.”

Timo Prusti, a Gaia space telescope project scientist at the European Space Agency, says in a press release that Gaia has proven itself to be a very capable tool.

“The beautiful map we are publishing today shows the density of stars measured by Gaia across the entire sky, and confirms that it collected superb data during its first year of operations… The satellite is working well and we have demonstrated that it is possible to handle the analysis of a billion stars. Although the current data are preliminary, we wanted to make them available for the astronomical community to use as soon as possible.”

The press release describes Gaia as “the largest all-sky survey of celestial objects to date… On its way to assembling the most detailed 3D map ever made of our Milky Way galaxy…”

European Space Agency Director of Science Alvaro Gimenez considers Gaia to be on the cutting edge.

“Gaia is at the forefront of astrometry, charting the sky at precisions that have never been achieved before… Today’s release gives us a first impression of the extraordinary data that await us and that will revolutionise our understanding of how stars are distributed and move across our Galaxy.”

The Gaia mission was launched in 2013, with data gathering and star mapping beginning in July 2014. The Gaia space telescope is comprised of a series of mirrors that send light to a camera that can detect millions and millions of pixels, far more sensitive that even the most advanced digital camera consumers can buy. The margin of error is incredibly minimal. Amos describes it as being like the size of a “coin on the Moon as seen from Earth.”

Over the course of multiple scans, Gaia will also receive information on star temperature and chemical composition. It may take up to five years or more to get full, detailed data on all one billion stars. Amos notes that Gaia’s mission will not end there.

“But the survey’s quality promises a raft of discoveries beyond just the star map. It will find new asteroids and planets. It will test physical constants and theories. Gaia’s sky map will be the reference to guide future telescopes’ observations.”

This week’s release of data by the Gaia space telescope is just the beginning. It will be a unique experience to discover what else is out there.

[Featured Image by ESA/ATG Medialab]

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