ESA’s Gaia Spacecraft Wraps Up Revolutionary Milky Way Mapping Mission
ESA’s decade-long Milky Way Gaia mapping mission still has tons of data to release over the next few years. Expect surprises.
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Gaia Mission Measures Metals In Milky Way Stars
Milky Way stars that are high and low in metallicity have been mapped by the ESA Gaia mission. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC ...
Gaia Completes Its Stellar Odyssey, Leaving a Cosmic Legacy
The Gaia mission, launched by the European Space Agency, has completed a decade of groundbreaking astronomical observations, collecting over three trillion data points on two billion stars and ...
Mapping 2 billion stars: How Gaia transformed our view of the Milky Way
Gaia was launched on December 19, 2013, and began scanning the stars in July 2014. It mapped over two billion stars, ...
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Giant planet or 'failed star?' Newfound mystery world blurs the lines
By tracing the corkscrew wobble of two stars as they move through the sky, the Gaia space mission has discovered one new ...
Scans of seemingly empty space reveal black holes not far from earth
If a star orbits a black hole, it will appear from a distance to be orbiting empty space. Gaia projects the star’s orbit on a ...
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Wobbling stars reveal giant companions
Data from the Gaia spacecraft shows that even unassuming stars can host monumental companions like massive planets.
Spacecraft Finds A Positively Enormous Planet 12 Times Jupiter's Mass
Gaia-4b is considered a super-Jupiter planet, a relatively cold gas giant, orbiting its star over 570 Earth-days. That star ...
The Gaia satellite, a fantastic star tracker, retires
The European satellite, launched in 2013, has exhausted its gas reserves and is preparing to return to a stable orbit before being 'passivated.' But while the data collection that revolutionized ...