Gaia is expanding its range. Its new release features Omega Centauri, asteroids, gravitational lenses, and variable stars.
The ESA's Gaia observatory expanded its targets to include the tightly-packed center of Omega Centauri, an ancient globular cluster. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowedgements: Michele Trabucchi, Nami Mowlavi and Thomas Lebzelter
In this new targeted release, Gaia covered up some gaps in its previous coverage, including regions where stars are tightly packed together. Gaia does its work by examining individual stars. But in this release, it turned its attention to other things, including globular clusters.Globular clusters are ancient, spheroidal groups of stars bound together by gravity. They can contain millions of stars and are found in galaxies, including our own.
Gaia examined Omega Centauri and saw ten times more stars in the cluster’s core. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia. Omega Centauri is ancient. Its stars are between 10 and 12 billion years old. GC’s role in the evolution of galaxies is unclear, as are their origins. They may be remnants of galaxy mergers, but scientists aren’t certain. This robust new data from Gaia may help answer our questions about GCs as it has with other issues in astronomy.
Gravitational lenses allow astronomers to see extremely distant objects as long as everything lines up right. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted their existence, and now they’re one more tool in astronomers’ toolboxes. They bring objects that are ordinarily too distant to observe within range. Distant, puzzling quasars are one of the objects that gravitational lenses bring into view.
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Gaia spacecraft reveals 'goldmine' of over 500,000 undiscovered starsRobert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. who specializes in science, space, physics, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, quantum mechanics and technology. Rob's articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space and ZME Science.
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