The European Space Agency will release new data from its mission to map the Gaia Milky Way on 13 June. Here’s how to get the latest live telescope updates.
A media briefing (opens in a new section) will be held on Monday, June 13, starting at 4 am EDT (0800 GMT). Experts from the Gaia mission will share highlights from the new data catalog, which includes information on nearly 2 billion celestial objects, mostly stars, but also planets and asteroids in the solar system and galaxies outside the Milky Way. The media briefing will be broadcast on ESA Web TV (opens in a new section).
Launched in 2013, Gaia’s mission is to create the most accurate and complete 3D map of our galaxy, Milky Way. The data collected by the Gaia spacecraft helped astronomers better understand the exact positions of a huge number of stars, their distances from Earth and the speeds at which they travel. Because objects in the universe follow the rules of physics, astronomers have been able to use data to model stellar trajectories in the distant Milky Way past and learn what happened in the early years of the galaxy.
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The publication of data on June 13 is set up to intensify this research as it contains new, previously unavailable information.
This will be Gaia’s third landfill, following datasets published in 2016 and 2018, and a subset of the third dataset in 2020. Data to be shared on 13 June was collected between July 2014. and May 2017
IN new data set will include the largest collection of astrophysical data on stars in the Milky Way, including information on the masses, temperatures and ages of nearly half a billion stars, as well as detailed chemical compositions of about 2 million stars. The catalog will also contain the largest ever study of binary star systems in the Milky Way and the largest set of data on the chemical composition of asteroids in the solar system. In addition, Gaia studies in detail the largest galactic neighbor of the Milky Way Andromeda Galaxyand conducted the first space-based study of the entire sky of quasars, super bright objects in the heart of some galaxies.
The media briefing will feature several studies that will be published on June 13, using Gaia’s latest observations. These documents highlight the great potential of Gaia’s new data, ESA said in a statement (opens in a new section).
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