ESA’s decade-long Milky Way Gaia mapping mission still has tons of data to release over the next few years. Expect surprises.
Meet The 4 Longest Venomous Snakes. Hint: Mamba And Bushmaster No Longer In Top 3 Due To These ‘New’ GiantsAfter 11 years in solar orbit, the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has completed its mapping of our Milky Way Galaxy to a precision never before achieved. Surviving solar radiation and even damage caused by micrometeorite bombardments, ESA’s Gaia has truly revolutionized our understanding of the Milky Way’s spiral structure.
But over the course of 10.5 years of science operations, Gaia has made some three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects, said ESA. In the process, it’s plotted the positions, distances, movements, brightness changes, composition and numerous other characteristics of stars by monitoring them with its three instruments, ESA noted.
Gaia has also strengthened the hypothesis that our own yellow dwarf star formed much further in towards the center of our galaxy. Over the course of our sun’s 4.6-billion-year history, it’s thought that the sun migrated outward to its current position sandwiched between the galaxy’s Perseus and Sagittarius arms.Another Ukrainian Brigade Is Disintegrating As It Deploys To Pokrovsk
Reconstructing the sun's orbit and possible changes in orbital radius is very difficult if not impossible, Anthony Brown, the Gaia data processing and analysis consortium executive chair and an astrophysicist at Leiden University in The Netherlands, told me via email. So, while there is consensus that stars migrate in the disk over their lifetimes, proving that this is the case for the sun is very hard, he said.
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