Articles about 'Gaia'

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.

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.

Astronomers have directly measured the mass of a dead star using an effect known as gravitational microlensing, first predicted by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, and first observed by two Cambridge astronomers 100 years ago.

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 Gaia satellite has spotted an enormous ‘ghost’ galaxy lurking on the outskirts of the Milky Way. 

An international team of astronomers has discovered an ancient and dramatic head-on collision between the Milky Way and a smaller object, dubbed ‘the Sausage galaxy’. The cosmic crash was a defining event in the early history of the Milky Way and reshaped the structure of our galaxy, fashioning both the galaxy’s inner bulge and its outer halo, the astronomers report in a series of new papers.

The first results from the Gaia satellite, which is completing an unprecedented census of more than one billion stars in the Milky Way, are being released today to astronomers and the public.

A new method of measuring the distances between stars enables astronomers to climb the ‘cosmic ladder’ and understand the processes at work in the outer reaches of the galaxy.