Paris: Monday’s Gaia spacecraft reveals the latest discoveries in its quest to map the Milky Way in unprecedented detail, surveying nearly two million stars and attacking a giant tsunami-like fiery giant. Revealed a typical “star earthquake”. The European Space Agency (ESA) states that the third dataset of the mission, released to enthusiastic astronomers around the world at 1000 GMT, “revolutionized the understanding of the galaxy.”
However, Gaia is also looking beyond the Milky Way, discovering 2.9 million other galaxies and 1.9 million quasars, the surprisingly bright galactic centers powered by supermassive black holes. The Gaia spacecraft is in a strategically located orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and has been watching the sky since it was launched by the ESA in 2013.
According to ESA, observations of star earthquakes and large-scale vibrations that change the shape of distant stars were “one of the most amazing discoveries coming out of new data.” Gaia was not built to observe star earthquakes, but at least according to the current understanding of the universe, it has detected strange phenomena in thousands of stars.
“Turbulence” galaxy
“There is a wonderful new gold mine for performing asteroseismology of hundreds of thousands of stars in our Milky Way galaxy,” said Conny Aerts, a team member of Gaia. Gaia investigated more than 1.8 billion stars, which is only about 1% of the Milky Way stars, which is about 100,000 light-years in diameter. The probe is equipped with two telescopes and a billion-pixel camera to capture a clear image sufficient to measure the diameter of a single human hair 1,000 km (620 miles) away.
There are also a variety of devices that can not only map stars, but also measure their movement, chemical composition, and age. With incredibly accurate data, “we can look at the past history of our own Milky Way for over 10 billion years,” said Anthony Brown, chair of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium, which screened a large amount of data. I am.
Gaia’s results are already “much better than expected” at this point, Minar said. They show that our galaxies are not moving smoothly through the universe as they were thought, but instead are “turbulent” and “restless”. “It has experienced many accidents in its life, and it still has them,” he added, as it interacts with other galaxies. “Maybe it will never be stationary.” “Our galaxy is certainly a living thing, a place where objects are born and die,” says Arts.
“Thousands of extrasolar planets”
“The surrounding galaxies are constantly interacting with and sometimes falling into our galaxies.” Approximately 50 scientific papers have been published with new data, and more will be published in the coming years. Gaia’s observations have energized thousands of studies since the first dataset was released in 2016. The second dataset in 2018 allowed astronomers to show that the Milky Way merged with another galaxy in a violent collision about 10 billion years ago.
It took the team five years to provide the latest data. This was observed from 2014 to 2017. The final dataset will be released in 2030 after Gaia completes an empty survey in 2025. Other Potential Candidates-But far more are expected in the future. “In principle, Gaia should be able to detect tens of thousands of exoplanets down to Jupiter’s mass, especially if it lasts for 10 years,” Brown said. – AFP
