It’s a 3D, moving atlas of the Milky Way.īuilding such a tool is more difficult than you might imagine. It also contains information on the distance, motion, and color (useful in determining temperature and age) of about 1.3 billion of the stars. This database is not just for making pretty images. When you look at those stars, you’re looking at untold numbers of planets, moons, asteroids, and comets clutched within their orbits. That’s around 700 million more than its last update in 2016. Gaia’s latest map (click to find a very cool interactive version), released Wednesday, includes 1.7 billion stars. And it is truly the largest 3D star atlas ever assembled. The image above (and an easier-to-scan version below) was produced by Gaia, the European Space Agency craft, whose mission is to produce a detailed three-dimensional map of the stars our galaxy. This is what happens when you shoot an incredibly high-resolution, 1 billion-pixel camera into space and instruct it to take a photo of every single star it can see.
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