Conny Aerts, a professor at the Institute of Astronomy in Leuven, Belgium and a member of Gaia, said: Collaboration with ESA News, a group of 400 researchers working on data from a project release.
Previously, Gaia detected radial vibrations (movements diverging from common ground). This caused some stars to periodically expand and contract while maintaining a spherical shape. The newly discovered vibration was non-radial.
Gaia is about 930,000 miles from Earth in the opposite direction of the Sun. The spacecraft is equipped with two telescopes that can scan the galaxy from a location called Lagrange 2, or L2 Point. At this point, the spacecraft can remain stable due to the gravitational balance between the Earth and the Sun.
This also means that the spacecraft will not be interfered with by the Earth’s light and will be able to use minimal fuel to stay in place. The vantage point allows Gaia to have a free view and continuously scan our galaxy.
Much of the latest information about the Milky Way is revealed by Gaia’s newly released spectroscopic data. This is the result of a technique that divides the starlight into constituent colors like a rainbow.
The data collected by Gaia includes Chemical composition, temperature, mass, star age, and The speed at which they move toward and away from the earth. Detailed information about more than 150,000 asteroids and cosmic dust (between the stars) in our solar system has also been released.
“Gaia’s chemical mapping is similar to sequencing the DNA of the human genome,” he said. The Mallard Institute of Space Sciences, University College London, according to a statement from the Royal Astronomical Society.
“The more stars we know about chemistry, the better we can understand our entire galaxy. The 6 million star Gaia’s chemistry catalog is 10 times larger than the previous ground catalog. , This is really innovative. Gaia’s data release says tell us where the stars are and how they are moving. Now we also know what many of these stars are made of. increase.” Seabroke said.
“Unlike other missions that target specific objects, Gaia is a research mission,” said Timo Pursty, a project scientist at ESA’s Gaia.
“This means that while exploring the entire sky with billions of stars many times, Gaia must make discoveries that other, more devoted missions will miss.” Said. “This is one of its strengths, and we can’t wait for the astronomical community to dive into new data and learn more about our galaxy and its surroundings than we can imagine.”
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