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Gaia is ESA’s mission to create the most accurate and complete multi-dimensional map of the Milky Way. This allows astronomers to reconstruct our home galaxy’s past and future evolution over billions of years, better understand the lifecycle of stars, and our place in the Universe.
On 13 June, Gaia’s third full data set will be released, which contains new and improved details for almost two billion objects in our Milky Way and revolutionises our understanding of the galaxy.
The catalogue includes new information, including chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colours, masses, ages, and the speed at which stars move towards or away from us. Much of this information was revealed by the newly released spectroscopy, a technique in which the starlight is split (like a rainbow). It also lists special subsets of stars, like those that change brightness over time. Also new in this data set is the largest catalogue yet of binary stars in the Milky Way, thousands of Solar System objects such as asteroids and moons of planets, and millions of galaxies and quasars outside the Milky Way.
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.
The event will be streamed publicly at esawebtv.esa.int