The third installment of this map also includes the largest set of data ever collected on binary stars

Latest Catalog Data Release gaia almost . Contains new and improved information from 2 billion stars From wa lectia and “surprising discoveries”, such as stellar earthquakes and observations of unknown stars.

The third installment of this map also includes the largest set of data collected to date on binary stars from thousands of objects in the Solar System. -such as asteroids and planetary moons- and millions of galaxies and quasars located outside our Milky Way.

gaia It is a mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 2013, with the aim of producing the most accurate and complete multidimensional map of the Earth. wa lectiaWhich will help astronomers reconstruct the past and future evolution of our galaxy over billions of years.

ESA’s director-general, Josef Aschbacher, told a press conference that “this is an exciting day” that they have been waiting “for a long time” because this catalog will “open the door to a new science”. wa lectia,

Catalog gaia Nearby stars include 331,312 Itemswhich is estimated to be 92% of the stars within 100 parsecs (326 to light) from the sun. The last census of the solar neighborhood, called the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars, was done in 1957.

The catalog contains new information including chemical composition, stellar temperature, color, mass, age and the speed at which stars are approaching or moving away from us.

One of the most surprising discoveries to emerge from the new data is that gaia Starquakes (small movements on the surface of a star) are able to detect that stars change shapeSomething for which the observatory was not originally built.

“Starquakes teach us a lot about stars, especially about their inner workings, gaia “It’s opening a gold mine for ‘asteroids’ of massive stars,” says Connie Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium, who is a contributing member. gaia,

What the stars are made of can tell us about their place of birth and subsequent travel, and thus about the history of the Earth. wa lectia, With today’s data release, Gaia reveals the largest chemical map of the Milky Way in conjunction with 3D motions, from our solar neighborhood to the smaller galaxies around us.

Some stars contain more “heavy metals” than others. during big Bang Only the light elements (hydrogen and helium) were formed. All other heavy elements, called metals by astronomers, build up inside stars. When stars die, they release these metals into the gas and dust between the stars, called the interstellar medium, from which new stars are formed. Active star formation and death Lead to an environment rich in metals. Therefore, the chemical composition of a star is similar to that of its DNA, which gives us important information about its origin.

Thief gaiawe see that some Stars Some of our galaxies are composed of primitive material, while others, like our Sun, are composed of material enriched by previous generations of stars. Stars closer to the center and plane of our galaxy are richer in metals than stars at greater distances. Gaia also identified the stars that originally came from Galaxies other than ourson the basis of its chemical composition.