Gaia satellite mapped more than a billion stars in Milky Way, says ESA

Photo Credit: ESA

Paris: The European Space Agency (ESA) on Wednesday released the first catalogue of more than a billion stars from its Gaia satellite to the eagerly waiting astronomers around the world.

According to ESA, Gaia satellite which was launched in 2013 has mapped more than a billion stars in the Milky Way and vastly expanding the inventory of known stars in our galaxy.

French astronomer Francois Mignard, a member of the 450-strong Gaia consortium said that the initial catalogue of 1.15 billion stars is both the largest and the most accurate full-sky map ever produced.

Scientists has unveiled a stunning map of the Milky Way in a web-cast press conference at the ESA Astronomy Centre in Madrid.including stars up to half a million times feinter than those that can be seen with the naked eye.

The images were captured by Gaia's twin telescopes - scanning the heavens over and over - and a billion-pixel camera, the largest ever put into space.

The resolution is sharp enough to gauge the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometres, said Anthony Brown, head of the Gaia data processing and analysis team.

Gaia maps the position of the Milky Way's stars in a couple of ways.

Not only does it pinpoint their location, the probe - by scanning each star multiple times - can plot their movement as well.

The data release today includes both kinds of data for some two million stars.

But over the course of Gaia's five-year mission, that catalogue is set to expand 500-fold.

Orbiting the Sun 1.5 million kilometres beyond Earth's orbit, the European probe started collected data in July 2014.

(With Agency inputs)