The Conversation contributed the article to Space.com's expert voices.
Adam and Andrew are professors at The Open University.
New data has just been released by the European space agency. The goal of the satellite was to measure the position of a billion stars. The satellite has collected data on a lot of other objects.
There's a lot to make astronomy happy. Here are some of our favorites from the data.
This is the first time that the Milky Way has been mapped like this.
The stars are no exception. The biggest three-dimensional map of the Milky Way has been released. There are two dimensions to the motions of stars, up-down and left-right. The stars' radial velocities are shown in the latest data as they move away from us.
By combining the radial velocity with the proper motions, we can see how fast stars are moving in the sky. The best map of where the stars are now is not the only thing we can see. We can see how things have changed and how they used to be.
This can help us understand the history of our galaxy, such as which stars may have come from other galaxies and merged with our own. It's possible to find hidden objects, such as planets and brown dwarfs, from the tiny wobbles they cause as they travel through the stars.
The stars in our own galaxy are not the only ones measured by Gaia. The data includes a survey called Gaps. The brightness of stars is measured in a photometric survey. The brightness of the stars in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy has been measured.
A total of 1.2 million stars was included. The foreground stars in the Milky Way that were in the way should be included. This will allow us to learn more about the evolution of the largest stars in Andromeda and where they are in their lives.
Some of the old stars that are reaching the end of their lives could go on to produce big explosions.
Quasars are the most energetic objects in the universe and the most distant ones. There are 1.1 million of them. Black holes are caught in a feeding frenzy in quasars There are more than 6 million quasar candidates found by Gaia.
This could greatly increase the number of known quasars because they can measure the distance to the farthest reaches of the universe. We can measure how fast the universe is growing. Since we don't know which one is right, we need to measure that more accurately.
Not all of the things that Gaia is studying are close to home. There are 158,000 objects in the data. We know exactly what paths the asteroids follow as they travel around the sun.
The Gaia team has shown that they can find moons in the vicinity of asteroids. Even though there are a few hundred asteroids with moons, Gaia can still find them. It can measure the positions of asteroids so accurately that it can see the wobble caused by a moon's gravity. There could be more than one new moon according to the latest data from the European Space Agency.
The chaos of the early solar system can be seen in the data gathered about asteroids.
Our sun is not the only star that has companions around a shared center. The first taste of the multiple-star system catalog is contained in the new data. The initial list contains 813,000 two-star systems, but the full catalog will come later.
We can learn a lot about how stars work. It's also true for what's called an outlying system. The stars pass in front of each other in these systems because they are lined up. We can measure the stars' mass and size, as well as how far away they are, with the help of ellipsesing binaries. We can learn a lot more from studying single stars.
We can't wait to get stuck into this new data and see what we can find. Some of these answers may be available in the next few months.
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