Gaia’s first sky map reveals secrets of the Milky Way
Thursday, 15 September, 2016
The first catalogue of more than a billion stars from ESA’s Gaia satellite has been published on September 14, being the largest all-sky survey of celestial objects to date.
Launched 1,000 days ago, Gaia started its scientific work in July 2014. This first release is thus based on data collected during its first 14 months of scanning the sky, up to September 2015.
On its way to assembling the most detailed 3D map ever made of our Milky Way galaxy, Gaia has pinned down the precise position on the sky and the brightness of 1.142 billion stars, but also the distances and the motions across the sky for more than two million stars.
Interested in Gaia?
Now you have the chance to play with Gaia data and look for novel phenomena through the web portal that has been opened to all publics, the Gaia Archive.
In just 24 hours this portal reached its first 10,000 users, receiving 15,751 Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL) and downloading 20TB of data from the file repository.