The brand new information consists of new info such because the age, mass, temperature and chemical composition of stars. This can be utilized, for instance, to find out which stars had been born in one other galaxy after which migrated to the Milky Manner.
Gaia was additionally capable of detect greater than 100,000 so-called starquakes, which ESA likened to massive tsunamis that ripple throughout stars. These enable scientists to infer the density, inside rotation and temperature inside stars, astrophysicist Conny Aerts stated.
Though it has solely collected info on about 1% of the Milky Manner’s stars, the mission is already offering the idea for round 1,600 scientific publications a 12 months.
Challenge scientist Timo Prusti stated the sheer variety of stars noticed makes it extra seemingly that scientists will make very uncommon discoveries.
“You need to observe plenty of objects with a purpose to get the needle within the haystack,” he stated.
ESA chief Josef Aschbacher stated having extra information additionally permits astronomers to grasp a few of the forces at play within the galaxy, equivalent to the way in which our personal photo voltaic system is being thrown about contained in the Milky Manner.
“It’s enabling issues that will by no means be doable with out this huge variety of information,” he stated.
The Gaia information now being launched additionally consists of info on 800,000 binaries — stars that transfer in tandem with one another — in addition to a number of new exoplanets, lots of of hundreds of asteroids within the photo voltaic system and tens of millions of objects past our galaxy.
