The European Gaia mission’s ever-improving catalogue has become astronomers’ standard reference for the Galaxy.
The Milky Way in four maps: data from the Gaia spacecraft show the speed at which stars move towards or away from us, known as radial velocity ; their radial velocity and proper motion, or how they move across the sky ; their chemical make-up ; and the interstellar dust .Astronomers’ main reference guide to the Milky Way just received a major update.
“Every day, five papers from Gaia are published,” said ESA director of science Günther Hasinger during an online presentation of the catalogue from Noordwijk, the Netherlands. “In the last three years we have overtaken the gold standard of astronomy, the Hubble Space Telescope, and we are now producing 1,600 papers per year.”Gaia orbits the Sun at a fixed distance from Earth. Over the course of a year, it makes repeated measurements of the same stars from slightly different perspectives.
One important application will be to detect and study clusters of stars that move together across the Galaxy, says Tereza Jerabkova, an astronomer at European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. “I think everyone in the star cluster community will jump on the new radial velocities that will allow to analyse more stars in 6D” — which include three dimensions for each star’s positions and three for its direction of motion.
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