GAIA an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy and the Milky Way

GAIA Launching in 5 days time.

The main goal of the Gaia mission is to make the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of our Galaxy by surveying an unprecedented one per cent of its population of 100 billion stars.

During the mapping, Gaia will detect and very accurately measure the motion of each star in its orbit around the centre of the Galaxy. Much of this motion was imparted upon each star during its birth and studying it allows astronomers to peer back in time, to when the Galaxy was first forming. By constructing a detailed map of the stars, Gaia will provide a crucial tool to study the formation of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. While surveying the sky, Gaia is bound to make many other discoveries.

During its anticipated lifetime of five years, Gaia will observe each of its one billion sources about 70 times, resulting in a record of the brightness and position of each source over time. Together with the unprecedented accuracy of the astrometric measurements, this will lead to the discovery of: planets around other stars, asteroids in our Solar System, icy bodies in the outer Solar System, brown dwarfs, and far-distant supernovae and quasars. The list of Gaia's potential discoveries makes the mission unique in scope and scientific return.

sci.esa.int...

billion pixel camera

Wow that is cool.
I sure hope a game like Star Citizen uses this map for their upcoming game

reply to post by EnigmaAgent


They have trouble determining the parallax of Deneb, which is assumed to be only around 1,500 ly away. How do they expect to resolve the distance of stars 100 000 ly away?? Hipparcos itself gave weird data about the Pleiades' exact distance, even though this star cluster is only 450 ly away (more or less). I can tell you guys that the Galaxy is far larger than that!

And how do they hope to resolve the Core view problem? Until now, a small but significant portion of the Galaxy is blocked from our view by the Core. To see stars behind the Core we would need to send probes thousands of ly away from Earth.

Thanks for the info though. S&F!

boymonkey74
Wow that is cool.
I sure hope a game like Star Citizen uses this map for their upcoming game

They will likely use it's predecessor, Hipparcos's data as many games do until the first GAIA data release.

reply to post by EnigmaAgent


Good video, it let's me understand the mission a little more than before I watched it. Measuring two million stars an hour sounds like a grand chore.