![]() The video starts from the positions of stars as measured by Gaia between 20, and shows how these positions are expected to evolve in the future, based on the stars' proper motions or direction of travel across space.Īrtist’s impression of The Milky Way Galaxy to provide context for the video. ![]() ![]() This video shows more than 2 million stars from the TGAS sample, with the addition of 24,320 bright stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue that weren't included in Gaia's first data release back in September 2016. The sun and stars in its vicinity orbit the core at some half-million miles an hour, but nearly all are so far away that their apparent motion has barely moved the needle over the time span of civilization as we know it. We know that stars are constantly on the move around the galactic center. Only a few stars-Arcturus, Sirius, Aldebaran-have moved enough for a sharp-eyed observer of yore to perceive their motion. Generations of people have lived and died since the days of ancient Greece and yet the constellations outlines and naked eye stars appear nearly identical today as they did then. Think about how slowly stars move from the human perspective. Gaia's radial velocity measurements-the motion of stars toward or away from us- will provide astronomers with a stereoscopic and moving-parts picture of about 1% of the galaxy's stars. Its mission is astrometry: measuring the precise positions, distances and motion of 1 billion astronomical objects (primarily stars) to create a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way galaxy. Gaia is a space observatory parked at the L2 Lagrange Point, a stable place in space a million miles behind Earth as viewed from the sun.
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