Gaia ceases operations after completing decade-long mapping of the Milky Way

From ancient creeks of stars to the innards of white dwarfs, the Gaia Space Telescope has seen it all.

On Thursday, the European Space Agency’s mission specialists will send the low-fuel Gaia into orbit around the Sun, turning it off to astronomers around the world after more than a decade of service.

Gaia has been charting the universe since 2014, creating a vast encyclopedia of the position and movement of celestial objects from the Milky Way and beyond. It is difficult to grasp the breadth of development and discovery that a spinning observatory is enabled. But here are a few numbers: nearly 2 billion stars, millions of potential galaxies, and around 150,000 asteroids. These observations were brought Over 13,000 studies so far by astronomers.

Gaia changed the way scientists understand the universe, and that data became the reference point for many other telescopes on the ground and in the universe. Additionally, less than a third of the data collected has been released to scientists so far.

“It now supports almost everything in astronomy,” says Anthony Brown, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, heading Gaia’s data processing and analysis group. “If you were to ask my astronomy colleagues, I don’t think they could have imagined that Gaia would have to do her research even if she wasn’t there.”

Starting in 2013, Gaia’s main goal was to uncover the history and structure of the Milky Way by constructing the most accurate, three-dimensional map of the position and velocity of 1 billion stars. As there is only a small portion of that data, astronomers Halo mass of dark matter We swallowed and identified our galaxy Thousands of trespassing stars ingested from another galaxy 10 billion years ago.

Dr. Brown measures continuous vibrations on the Milky Way disk and measures a kind of galactic seismology – evidence Of encounters with satellite galaxies that have put ourselves in orbit much more recently than scientists believed. That may be the reason for the Milky Way It looks distorted When viewed from the side.