The robotic spacecraft unravels the history of the our galaxy’s evolution – and could identify habitable regions of the Milky Way
Astronomers have unveiled the most detailed survey of the Milky Way, revealing thousands of “starquakes” and stellar DNA, and helping to identify the most habitable corners of our home galaxy.
These measurements unexpectedly revealed thousands of starquakes, cataclysmic tsunami-like events on the surface of stars. “Starquakes teach us a lot about stars – notably, their internal workings,” said Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration. “Gaia is opening a goldmine for asteroseismology of massive stars.”
Gaia is fitted with a 1bn pixel camera – the largest ever in space – complete with more than 100 electronic detectors. The latest dataset represents the largest chemical map of the galaxy to date, cataloguing the composition of six million stars, ten times the number measured in previous ground-based catalogues.
“Our galaxy is a beautiful melting pot of stars,” said Alejandra Recio-Blanco of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration. “This diversity is extremely important, because it tells us the story of our galaxy’s formation.”
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