Gaia’s Multi-Billion-Star Map of the Milky Way Keeps Getting Better

Every last bit of data from the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics was uploaded to the Gaia Archive. Data Release 3 (DR3) was finally released to the public after many years of testing and calibrating the data of hundreds of millions of stars. Between reading press releases and posting pictures of telescope-themed cakes on social media, scientists began searching for the next big discoveries.

Within minutes of the release, the European Space Agency released updated three-dimensional maps of the Milky Way and unleashed a torrent of new information on the billions of stars around us.

I didn't think we'd have good coverage. Ronald Drimmel is an astronomer at the Astrophysical Observatory of Turin at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics and a member of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium.

Drimmel spent a couple of months before the release double-checking some of Gaia's observations, just long enough to pull together a paper, one of the many papers the D PAC team wrote to demonstrate what is possible with DR3. Drimmel and his colleagues mapped out the stellar motions of different parts of our galaxy, especially those for the two trailing spirals. Knowing how the stars in these disparate regions move today can help researchers reverse engineer the emergence of our galaxy's distinctive spiral shape.

Adrian Price-Whelan is an astronomer at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. They used the updated stellar motions in DR3 to find signs of disruptions in the Milky Way's structure that were caused by near misses between us and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. This and other satellite galaxies help researchers pin down key events in the chaotic history of the Milky Way, revealing the epic collision and close calls that gave rise to our familiar spiral of stars over billions of years. The history of our galaxy is connected to the build up of our galaxy but also has consequences for the structures that we see in the universe.

The precise motions of stars can be used to identify smaller-scale systems within the galaxy, as well as stars around more exotic astrophysical objects. The dense remnants are leftover from the deaths of stars. Researchers expect to find a black hole from the Gaia data if the remnants of the stars are still in the system.

"Everyone is champing to find the black hole and we are all excited about it." In the days after the release, we combed through the enormous new catalog of binaries. There isn't anything. There is no giant black hole screaming at us. That is alright. Our hopes are still alive and well.

There's more to be worked on by the man. She says that the real powerhouse science that she thinks the Gaia data will bring is being able to observebinary stars. Synthetic versions of the Gaia data have been created. She uses mathematical models to create artificial populations of stars in order to look for holes in our theories.

There is a lot of fun with stars. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City has an astronomer who works on a sample of stars. She wants to find out where stars are coming from and where they are headed in the future. The addition of DR3 stellar spectra, which chart how a star's brightness varies in accordance with the wavelength, or color, of its emitted light, is helping the work of the man. The temperature and chemical composition of stars are conveyed by the stele. Stars that might have been born in the same region can be identified by their fingerprints. Astronomers can use this information to figure out how various stellar populations emerged and evolved over time, as well as how future generations of stars might form.

Star lovers are not the only ones excited about the project. Around 60,000 asteroids are included in the DR3's spectrum. Federica Spoto of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is able to use the spectrum to learn what distant asteroids are made of. Spoto wants to backtrack along the trajectory of asteroids to find the key impact events that formed them and when they happened. She says that if you follow the main asteroid belt, you can see when the solar system formed.

There is enough science to work on in DR3 for generations of astronomy to come, yet the data only comes from the first 3 months. Astronomers know that there are still years of untouched observations to look forward to. Drimmel's colleagues have been working on the next data release for over a year.

According to Paolo Tanga of the Cte d'Azur Observatory in France, we can expect to double the number of asteroids cataloged. exoplanet explorers are excited about the fact that there will be more massive stars to hopefully spot black holes in the area.

Thayne Currie is an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. He hopes to identify candidate star systems for follow-up studies with other telescopes that could confirm and pulsate any worlds there.

Currie and his colleagues are confident that their planet-hunting method works, based on preliminary explorations of earlier releases, and they are not the only ones. The first two exoplanets were confirmed in a preprint paper that was accepted for publication by Astronomy and Astrophysics. Panahi and his colleagues plan to look for the same changes in brightness in the new data to find more exoplanets based on the success of their technique.

"Other people want sexier missions, such as NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope and its similarly expensive (and expansive) proposed successors that plan to search for signs of life in on other worlds." The Gaia mission is an all-sky survey of stars. The mission's ability to measure the brightness and position of objects that pass through it's line of sight makes it a powerful tool for astronomy. The measurement of the universe is called a distance measurement. This is the greatest distance measurement observatory.