Articles about 'milky way'

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.

Researchers have found a new way to measure dark energy – the mysterious force that makes up more than two-thirds of the universe and is responsible for its accelerating expansion – in our own cosmic backyard.

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 Magellanic Clouds, the two largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, appear to be connected by a bridge stretching across 43,000 light years, according to an international team of astronomers led by researchers from the University of Cambridge. The discovery is reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) and is based on the Galactic stellar census being conducted by the European Space Observatory, Gaia.

A space mission to create the largest, most-accurate, three-dimensional map of the Milky Way is celebrating its first completed year of observations.

A team of astronomers at the University of Cambridge is taking the next big step in a European-wide programme which will lead to the creation of the first three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars.