The Gaia project has already mapped data from billions of stars in our corner of the universe, such as their speed, position and color. This number will increase with the new update.
First of all, half a million new stars located in the Omega Centauri globular star cluster will appear in the database on Tuesday morning. The space telescope has not yet been able to map such star clusters, because the stars inside are so densely packed that their combined brightness overwhelms available instruments. Indirectly, people have now been able to fill in these gaps in the galactic star map.
150 thousand asteroids
But it’s not just the stars that Gaia has drawn this time. The new update also contains data about the interstellar gas in the Milky Way’s disk. In addition, the Gaia update provides data from more than 150,000 asteroids flying through the solar system: collected rocks and debris that represent the remains of the birth of Earth and other planets. The orbits of these space rocks, all located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, have now been determined with about twenty times greater accuracy.
In addition, 381 very bright and distant galaxies appear in the data set; So-called quasars, which are located deep in the universe, far beyond the boundaries of the Milky Way Galaxy.
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Georg van Hal writes for Volkskrant about astronomy, physics and space travel. He published books on everything from the universe to the smallest, most basic elements of reality.
Such quasars are found because very heavy masses can distort space and thus act as a kind of lens. Often, such a lens, viewed from Earth, happens to reveal a quasar. Cosmologists use such galaxies as touchstones for their ideas about the history and expansion of the universe as a whole. The new collection of quasars is the largest ever available to astronomers.
Medium version
The current star map update is kind of a temporary release. The previous update, version 3, was released in 2022, which added more than 1.8 billion stars. Version 4 is expected to follow at the end of 2025.
Previous versions of the Gaia star map have brought astronomers a flood of new discoveries about the history and composition of the Milky Way. For example, researchers previously discovered that the outer parts of our galaxy were originally part of another galaxy that collided with our own about 10 billion years ago.
Although five research articles were published immediately after the data were published, they mainly confirm that the new data is reliable. Starting Tuesday, the astronomical community can begin using the data to conduct more in-depth research.
