One billion star map released

[editor]

This is an impressive piece of work

The first catalogue of more than a billion stars from ESA's Gaia satellite was published today – the largest all-sky survey of celestial objects to date.

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 1142 million stars.

As a taster of the richer catalogue to come in the near future, today's release also features the distances and the motions across the sky for more than two million stars.

Hi res maps here ESA Science & Technology: Gaia's first sky map

The big one: 15360 × 7831 (80.7 MB)

 

[Idaho]

This story interested me. But either the hi res image crashes my phone browser, or it gives me a very ordinary grainy picture which doesn't show anything interesting. Not sure what I need to do to look at billions of stars.

 

[SpookyFrank]

I don't think the real universe is that stripey.

 

[ferrelhadley]

On its way to assembling the most detailed 3D map ever made of our Milky Way galaxy,

Beyond standard candles and those that display parallax how can it be 3D? Or is it just adding to the number of the aforementioned?

Also is that the Large and Small Magenllanic Clouds in the bottom right quadrant? (edited read the story dunce )

A standard candle is a class of astrophysical objects, such as supernovae or variable stars, which have known luminosity due to some characteristic quality possessed by the entire class of objects.

Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines