Gaia

Gaia is an Even More Powerful Planet Hunter Than we Thought

Utilizing tools for purposes they weren’t initially intended for is a strength of the astronomical community. Scrounging through data collected…

2 years ago

Thanks to Gaia, Astronomers are Able to Map Out Nebulae in 3D

In this 2D image of nebulae in the Orion Molecular Complex, the submillimetre-wavelength glow of dust clouds is overlaid on…

2 years ago

ESA’s Gaia Just Took a Picture of L2 Neighbor JWST

Oh, hello there new neighbor!  In February, the Gaia spacecraft took a picture of its new closest companion in space…

2 years ago

Our Part of the Galaxy is Packed with Binary Stars

Binary star systems are everywhere. They make up a huge percentage of all known solar systems: from what we can…

3 years ago

Gaia has Already Given Us 5 New Insights Into the Milky Way

The European Space Agency launched the Gaia mission in 2013. The mission's overall goal was to discover the history of…

4 years ago

A Stellar Stream of Stars, Stolen from Another Galaxy

Modern professional astronomers aren't much like astronomers of old. They don't spend every suitable evening with their eyes glued to…

4 years ago

The Solar System Might Not Exist if There Wasn’t a Huge Galactic Collision with the Milky Way Billions of Years Ago

The Milky Way has a number of satellite galaxies; nearly 60 of them, depedending on how we define them. One…

4 years ago

The Disk of the Milky Way is Warped Because it Already Collided With Another Galaxy

Using data from the second Gaia data release, a team of astronomers has demonstrated that the "warp" in our galaxy…

4 years ago

An Upcoming Impact With the Magellanic Clouds is Already Causing Star Formation in the Milky Way

A new study presented at the 235th meeting of the AAS this week shows how star formation is already happening…

4 years ago

Thanks to Gaia, we Now Know Exactly How Big Europa is

The ESA's Gaia mission recently allowed astronomers to catch a glimpse of Europa as it passed in front of a…

5 years ago