Astronomers around the world got a gift today—the first batch of data from Europe’s Gaia satellite, which for the past 14 months has been mapping the stars in our Milky Way galaxy and its neighborhood with unprecedented accuracy.
This first of five data releases from the five-year mission has already yielded some surprises. Our close galactic neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud, appears to be larger in extent, with more stars in the outskirts, than astronomers had previously thought. The same is likely true of the Milky Way.
That’s just a hint of the expected scientific yield from the Gaia atlas, which will be unmatched in precision and completeness. The catalog contains more than 1.1 billion stars, or approximately one percent of the number thought to reside in our galaxy. Some 400 million of these are being seen for the first time by Gaia, which can detect stars down to 20th magnitude, or 500,000 times fainter than what the naked eye can make out.
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