THE AMERICA ONE NEWS
May 31, 2025  |  
0
 | Remer,MN
Sponsor:  QWIKET 
Sponsor:  QWIKET 
Sponsor:  QWIKET: Elevate your fantasy game! Interactive Sports Knowledge.
Sponsor:  QWIKET: Elevate your fantasy game! Interactive Sports Knowledge and Reasoning Support for Fantasy Sports and Betting Enthusiasts.
back  
topic
NYTimes
New York Times
27 Mar 2025
Katrina Miller


NextImg:Farewell to Gaia, the Milky Way’s Cartographer

From ancient star streams to the innards of white dwarfs, the Gaia space telescope has seen it all.

On Thursday, mission specialists at the European Space Agency will send Gaia, which is low on fuel, into orbit around the sun, and switch it off after more than a decade of service to the world’s astronomers.

Gaia has charted the cosmos since 2014, creating a vast encyclopedia of the positions and movements of celestial objects in our Milky Way and beyond. It is difficult to capture the breadth of development and discovery that the spinning observatory has enabled. But here are a few numbers: nearly two billion stars, millions of potential galaxies and some 150,000 asteroids. These observations have led to more than 13,000 studies, so far, by astronomers.

ImageLight emanates from a far-off view of the Milky Way.
Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way galaxy and neighboring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars in the mission’s first two years of taking data.Credit...ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Image
An artist’s impression of the Milky Way as viewed from above, based on data from the Gaia space telescope.Credit...ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

Gaia has transformed the way scientists understand the universe, and its data has become a reference point for many other telescopes on the ground and in space. And less than a third of the data it has gathered has so far been released to scientists.

“It’s something that is now underpinning almost all of astronomy,” said Anthony Brown, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands who leads Gaia’s data processing and analysis group. “I think if you were to ask my astronomy colleagues, they couldn’t imagine anymore having to do research without Gaia being there.”


Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.


Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.