The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a detailed 3D map of the billions of stars found in the Milky Way. Since 2014, the organization's Gaia spacecraft has been scanning the sky in order to create a catalog of the bright-lit heavenly bodies. The first data to be revealed have included precise positions and brightness of 1.142 billion stars plus distances and motions of two million others. The observations have been packed by ESA scientists to make a stunning fly-through of a packed star cluster.
Gaia's latest release is only the beginning of loads of information about the Milky Way. According to ESA Science Director Alvaro Gimenez, Gaia, which is at the forefront of Astronomy, has been charting the sky at precisions that have never been achieved before.
The spacecraft's current works will inspire new research which will include knowing the stars' positions, movements and other physical qualities that can help researchers in studying the history and structure of the galaxy. Although today's endeavor is the biggest and most ambitious galaxy-mapping project yet, the huge amount of stars observed in the mission comprises only one percent of the stars in the galaxy.
The Gaia is on a five-year mission. In just fourteen months, it has reportedly collected a phenomenal amount of information since its launch last December 2013. Its ultimate goal is to make the most accurate, detailed and comprehensive star catalog ever.
Investigators have compared the map to Galileo's first chart of the 17th Century Orion which caused a new revolution. Incidentally, the 32-feet wide spacecraft, which carried a one-billion pixel camera, is situated nine million miles away from earth.
Gaia is in position not to build a chart of stars but to chart their movements across the celestial landscape. By the end of its mission, the spacecraft is expected to observe the billion stars based upon the accurate measurements of their position, velocity, luminosity and composition with its final data archive exceeding a petabyte.
