2023-10-10 18:35:45
This Tuesday, October 10, the Gaia space probe, dedicated to mapping the Milky Way, delivered its latest harvest of data revealing nearly half a million new stars and specifying in an unrivaled way the position of more than 150,000 asteroids .
A new vision of the Milky Way. After years of observation, the Gaia space probe has revealed its latest data: nearly 500,000 new stars and 150,000 asteroids have been discovered, the European Space Agency announced on Tuesday.
The ESA telescope, which has been operating 1.5 million kilometers from Earth for 10 years, provided, in its third catalog of 2022, the positions and movements of more than 1.8 billion stars, giving a fairly complete 3D view of our galaxy.
But the European Space Agency explained, when publishing an intermediate catalog, that there remained “gaps because Gaia had not fully explored areas of the sky particularly dense in stars”, called “globular clusters” in the space world.
A work of observation lasting several years
This is now done for the Gaia space probe, which selected the Omega Centauri cluster, the largest cluster observable from Earth, where it was able to spot 500,000 new stars and nearly 156,000 asteroids in our solar system.
Thanks to a long observation time, lasting 66 months, the probe calculated the orbital period of the asteroids with a precision “100 to 200 times better” than telescopes on the ground, indicated François Mignard, scientific manager of Gaia for the National Center for Space Studies.
For his part, Alexey Mints, co-author of the publication and member of the European Gaia consortium, declared that this result exceeded the expectations of the ESA and that it offered a “complete large-scale map of Omega Centauri” .
According to the European Space Agency, observing these stars and mapping the Omega Centauri cluster are crucial steps for scientists who want to “confirm the age of our galaxy”, given that the clusters , with extremely bright cores, are among the oldest objects in the Universe.
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