One billion stars mapped in galactic mission to draw space

The atlas might one day serve as a way of finding out how our own galaxy – including Earth and human life – was born

Wednesday 14 September 2016 16:12

An all-sky view of stars that belong to the Milky Way

(ESA/Gaia/DPAC)

One day we’re going to head off to the stars and explore the billions of worlds that are out in space. But we’re going to have to find our way first.

Thankfully, the European Space Agency has got us halfway there – capturing one billion stars in its effort to draw a map of our entire galaxy.

The agency has released the first data from what it calls the Gaia Mission, a huge project to draw the biggest and most precise 3D map of our own galaxy.

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

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1/30Nasa's most stunning pictures of space

An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013

Nasa

For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU)

Nasa

The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it

ESA/Hubble & NASA

Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago

The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays

Nasa

From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset

Nasa

Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead — sharing pictures of black holes

Nasa

X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

Nasa

A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory

Nasa

The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later — having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars

Nasa

This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3

This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter

Nasa

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account

Nasa

This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan

Nasa

Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass

Nasa

An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory

Nasa

An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

Nasa

Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack

Nasa

Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station

Nasa/Scott Kelly

The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts

Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity

The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower

ESA/Hubble & NASA

Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto

The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta

This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way

NASA & ESA

Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014

On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called “draa”

A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan

(NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere

This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

Mission manager Fred Jansen said that the project has already collected 500 million measurements and is “extremely” happy with how precise the data is. Now it will be passed among scientists for checking and analysis.

The mission to produce the map revolves around the 10-meter wide Gaia spacecraft. That ship – which is made up of a tube that sits on a big flat circle – is orbiting around the sun and uses two telescopes to assemble the data, sending it back to Earth to be put together by scientists.

Doing so is an incredible challenge – the agency has compared Gaia’s measuring abilities to being like measuring the diameter of a human hair from 600 miles away.

Anthony Brown, who leads the scientific consortium doing that work, said the highly precise data that Gaia sends back is a “revolution” in astrophysics. The information has already been sued to identify 400 million new stars.

The full map of the one billion stars – which is only about one per cent of those in the Milky Way – is going to be released towards the end of next year.

Scientists hope that map can be used to learn more about the origin and evolution of the galaxy, mapping out the forces that shaped it and continue to do so today.

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