Gaia telescope to revolutionise human understanding of the Milky Way next week: ESA

The Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics, also called the Gaia observatory, will soon change our understanding of the Milky Way, says the European Space Agency (ESA) which launched the observatory in December 2013. Gaia was launched about a decade ago to create the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of the Milky Way by surveying about 1% of our galaxy's 100 billion stars. In the latest update, ESA revealed that it will release the third full data set containing new and improved details for almost two billion objects in our Milky Way on June 13.

What will the Gaia telescope reveal next?

Explaining what lies ahead in the treasure trove of Gaia, ESA said that the soon-to-release catalogue will include new information on chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colours, masses, ages, and the speed of stars drifting toward or away within the Milky Way. The agency also said that the new data set will be the largest collection of data on binary stars lingering in our galaxy. Moreover, the catalogue also includes new information on thousands of objects such as asteroids and planetary moons in our solar system along with millions of galaxies and quasars outside the Milky Way. 

According to NASA, a quasar is basically an intensely bright object in a galactic center that emits powerful radio bursts. Interestingly, the light emitted by a quasar is so intense that it can outshine the combined brightness of all the stars in a galaxy. "Together with the new data set, about fifty scientific papers will be published of which nine are specifically dedicated to demonstrating the great potential of Gaia’s new data", ESA said in a statement. 

The new data set will be released by the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) which, in collaboration with ESA, is responsible for processing and analysing Gaia's data and for producing the Catalogues. Notably, this will be the third data set release after the first and second on September 14 in 2016 and April 25 in 2018, respectively.

More about the Gaia mission

The Gaia observatory is positioned at the second Lagrange point (L2) around 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth after being launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket. Weighing 2,029 kilograms, the one-of-a-kind observatory began its operations on July 25, 2014, to determine the composition, formation and evolution of the galaxy. Gaia is equipped with two high-resolution telescopes that spin every six hours and focuses the light on a single digital camera. 

Designed to observe a billion stars an average of 70 times, Gaia's first discovery was a supernova, Gaia14aaa, some 500 million light-years from Earth.