Farewell, Gaia: spacecraft operations come to an end
27 March 2025The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has been powered down, after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has been powered down, after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.
The European Space Agency’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.
A unique collaboration of astronomers and cancer researchers at Cambridge has been awarded more than £5m to establish the Spatial Profiling and Annotation Centre of Excellence (SPACE) to open up access to their groundbreaking cancer mapping technology and establish collaborations with other scientists to enable them to investigate tumours in 3D.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has released a goldmine of knowledge about our galaxy and beyond. Among other findings, the star surveyor has surpassed its planned potential to reveal half a million new and faint stars in a massive cluster, identified over 380 possible cosmic lenses, and pinpointed the positions of more than 150,000 asteroids within the Solar System.
A European mission to explore how gravity, dark energy and dark matter shaped the evolution of the Universe soared into space from Cape Canaveral on 1 July.
A major telescope upgrade has peered through to the distant Universe to reveal the spectra of a pair of galaxies 280 million light years away from Earth.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission has released a new treasure trove of data about our home galaxy, including stellar DNA, asymmetric motions, strange ‘starquakes’, and other fascinating insights.
An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, announced the most detailed ever catalogue of the stars in a huge swathe of our Milky Way galaxy.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.
Astronomy and oncology do not make obvious bedfellows, but the search for new stars and galaxies has surprising similarities with the search for cancerous cells. This has led to new ways of speeding up image analysis in cancer research.