A European space telescope has revealed extensive details about stellar diversity in our Milky Way, which will help scientists reconstruct the galaxy’s evolution and predict its evolution billions of years into the future.
Astronomers are using new data from the Gaia Observatory to map the movements and chemical signatures of nearly 2 billion stars – giants and dwarves, old and young – including some that vibrate strongly during events known as “earthquakes”.
The multidimensional space survey was published on Monday by the European Space Agency (ESA). Astronomers compare its impact on their field with genomic analysis in biology.
“Our galaxy is a beautiful pot of stars,” said Alejandra Resio-Blanco of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and a member of the Gaia collaboration. “This diversity is extremely important because it tells us the story of the formation of our galaxy. . . It also clearly shows that we all belong to an ever-changing system formed by a combination of stars and gas of various origins. ”
Gaia is in a special orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, called Lagrange point L2, near the new James Webb telescope, which was launched into space late last year. Gaia’s sample of 1.8 billion stars is about one percent of the Milky Way’s total stellar population.
“Gaia is a research mission,” said Timo Prousti, a project scientist at ESA, unlike many other observatories, such as the Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes. He said the approach meant that “Gaia is obliged to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss”.
“We can’t wait for the astronomical community to dive into our new data to find out more about our galaxy and its surroundings,” Proust said.
The publication adds new information on the chemical composition of stars, temperature, mass and speed of movement to or far from the solar system. Many stars, such as the sun, contain heavy metals recycled from previous generations of stars born and died in the 13.6 billion-year history of the Milky Way, although some contain only the primary light elements hydrogen and helium.
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An unexpected discovery from the new data is Gaia’s ability to detect stellar tremors – strong vibrations, like a stellar tsunami, found in thousands of stars. Connie Aerts, an asterosismologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, said: “Earthquakes teach us a lot about stars, especially their inner workings. . . in the same way that earthquakes help us understand what is happening inside our planet. ”
Although Gaia was launched in 2013 primarily for mapping stars, it also catalogs other objects, from millions of galaxies far beyond the Milky Way to asteroids in our solar system.
The telescope begins to detect planets orbiting the stars it studies, known as exoplanets. Anthony Brown, chairman of the Gaia Data Analysis Consortium, said about 200 possible planets elsewhere in the Milky Way have been identified so far, “but it should be able to identify tens of thousands of exoplanets when we get more data.”
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