The Gaia spacecraft is currently set about an incredible endeavor chart the spot of 1 billion stars in the Milky Way . Gaia is a European Space Agency ( ESA ) missionary station and ESA will publish the newfangled data in a few weeks . So the authority has settle to put out a little admonisher of what has been achieved so far .
Theimages releasedare of a sorry nebula that is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud . The nebula is particularly stark against the background , which is full of stars . Its Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe has been likened to a cat , with two eye and two paws at the front , or the visibility of a fox where one of the manus is its vulpine rostrum . A entirely unrepresentative and most likely slanted Twitter poll that I run while writing this powerfully incline towards George Fox rather than CT .
ESA released the figure of speech because they showcase the two different approaches used by the program to map the stars . Gaia can produce density function of the sky , which are compile by mapping the total number of stars in each pel . astronomer can utilise it to uncover the distribution of stellar objective in a particular area of the sky . The picture above is a tightness mathematical function .
The other advance , seen below , is a magnetic field mathematical function . The team made it by map the total radiation , or flux , recorded by the spacecraft in each pixel of the image . Since it focalise on the cleverness of champion , the more monolithic and brighter object eclipse this single-valued function .
By combine these two map , with precise three - dimensional positions of the stars , the team hop to soon be able to reconstruct this sour nebula ’s structure , as well as many others , in 3D. Gaia is equipped with a billion - pixel photographic camera . It is so precise that it can work out the sizing of a coin on the Moon and it is so sensitive that it can find objects 500,000 times fainter than the human middle ’s limit .
Thefirst data setwas release in September 2016 and it contained the position in the galaxy of about 1 billion stars and also the velocity of 2 million of those . By the end of the mission , Gaia will have observed every star about 70 times . The next data release will be published on April 25 .
