The European Gaia spacecraft, specialized in mapping the Milky Way, has delivered its latest crop of data, revealing half a million new stars and providing unprecedented precision in the location of more than 150,000 asteroids.
The European Space Agency (ESA) telescope, which has been 1.5 million kilometers from Earth for 10 years, has presented its third catalog for 2022, summarizing the positions and movements of more than 1.8 billion stars and quite a bit provides a complete 3D view of our galaxy.
But gaps remained because Gaia had not yet fully explored particularly star-rich areas of the sky, so-called globular clusters, explained the ESA on the occasion of the publication of an interim catalog – before the fourth complete catalog at the end of 2025.
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The cores of these star clusters are so bright that their light can overwhelm telescopes trying to get a clear view and represent the missing puzzle pieces of our maps of the universe, explains ESA in a press release.
Gaia selected the Omega-Centauri cluster, the largest that can be observed from Earth, and revealed there more than half a million stars that had not previously been observed because they were too close together.
This result, which exceeds expectations, offers a complete large-scale map of Omega Centauri, emphasizes Alexey Mints, co-author of the paper and member of the European Gaia consortium.
Since star clusters are among the oldest objects in the universe, observing them is a crucial step for scientists who want to confirm the age of our galaxy or even locate its center, according to ESA.
Another novelty: Gaia has clarified the position of more than 156,000 asteroids in our solar system, located in the asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter) or further away, such as Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.
Thanks to a long observation period (66 months, twice as long as before), the probe calculated its orbital period with an accuracy 100 to 200 times better than that of ground telescopes, explained François Mignard, Gaia’s scientific director for the National Center for Space Studies (CNES).
This means that the orbits of large asteroids such as Ceres, Hygiea or Métis are almost completely measured.
This serves, among other things, to refine predictions and the probabilities of an approach or even a future collision with the Earth, said the astronomer.