Smartphones have amazing onboard cameras these days. But they are no no match for the billion pixel instrument onboard a European Space Agency’s telescope about to release its first image of stars in our galaxy. The ESA’s Gaia spacecraft was launched several years ago, but its first detailed images are finally about to be unveiled, and they should be glorious:
Astronomers the world over are about to get their first taste of a tool that will transform their working lives. Gaia, a space telescope launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in late 2013, will release its first map of the Milky Way on 14 September. The catalogue will show the 3D positions of 2,057,050 stars and other objects, and how those positions have changed over the past two decades. Eventually, the map will contain one billion objects or more and will be 1,000 times more extensive and at least 10 times more precise than anything that came before.
Gaia will fine tune the distance between the sun and relatively nearby stellar neighbors like the exquisite Pleiades shown above, it will examine thousands of stars in our galaxy for tell-tale wobbles that could indicate new, unknown exoplanets, and it may help astronomers better estimate the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way. Gaia might even help astronomers with an interesting possibility related to mass extinctions on Earth: there is some discussion that dark matter layers in galaxy’s ecliptic could increase the likelihood of asteroids and comets falling through the inner solar system as the sun bobs and up and down through that mysterious invisible plane.
Bookmark the ESA Gaia homepage here to learn more.