News archive

News archive

Thanks to ESA's star mapping spacecraft Gaia and machine learning, astronomers have discovered 12 quasars whose light is so strongly deflected by foreground galaxies that they are each visible as four distinct images, called an 'Einstein cross'.

Published: 7 April 2021

The motion of stars in the outskirts of our galaxy hints at significant changes in the history of the Milky Way. This and other equally fascinating results come from a set of papers that demonstrate the quality of ESA's Gaia Early third Data Release (EDR3), which is made public today.

Published: 3 December 2020

The formation of the Sun, the Solar System and the subsequent emergence of life on Earth may be a consequence of a collision between our galaxy, the Milky Way, and a smaller galaxy called Sagittarius, discovered in the 1990s to be orbiting our galactic home.

Published: 25 May 2020

Astronomers have pondered for years why our galaxy, the Milky Way, is warped. Data from ESA's star-mapping satellite Gaia suggest the distortion might be caused by an ongoing collision with another, smaller, galaxy, which sends ripples through the galactic disc like a rock thrown into water.

Published: 2 March 2020

A 500-day global observation campaign spearheaded more than three years ago by ESA’s galaxy-mapping powerhouse Gaia has provided unprecedented insights into the binary system of stars that caused an unusual brightening of an even more distant star.

Published: 21 January 2020

Rather than leaving home young, as expected, stellar 'siblings' prefer to stick together in long-lasting, string-like groups, finds a new study of data from ESA's Gaia spacecraft.

Published: 28 August 2019

On 31 March 2017, Jupiter's moon Europa passed in front of a background star – a rare event that was captured for the first time by ground-based telescopes thanks to data provided by ESA's Gaia spacecraft.

Published: 25 July 2019
The first direct measurement of the bar-shaped collection of stars at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy has been made by combining data from ESA’s Gaia mission with complementary observations from ground- and space-based telescopes.
Published: 16 July 2019
ESA's Gaia mission has been busy mapping our Milky Way galaxy since 2014, and just over one year ago released its second batch of data on more than one billion stars. Since then, astronomers have been exploring this catalogue to reveal a huge amount of new information about the cosmos. One type of object that has seen an abundance of new...
Published: 17 May 2019
While ESA's Gaia mission has been surveying more than one billion stars from space, astronomers have been regularly monitoring the satellite's position in the sky with telescopes across the world, including the European Southern Observatory in Chile, to further refine Gaia's orbit and ultimately improve the accuracy of its stellar census.
Published: 2 May 2019
ESA's Gaia satellite is on a mission: to map and characterise more than one billion of the stars in the Milky Way. Many of these stars reside in complex, eye-catching clusters scattered throughout our Galaxy and, by studying these stellar groupings, Gaia is revealing much about the formation and evolution of stars in our cosmic home and...
Published: 26 February 2019
ESA's Gaia satellite has looked beyond our Galaxy and explored two nearby galaxies to reveal the stellar motions within them and how they will one day interact and collide with the Milky Way – with surprising results.
Published: 7 February 2019
Data captured by ESA's galaxy-mapping spacecraft Gaia has revealed for the first time how white dwarfs, the dead remnants of stars like our Sun, turn into solid spheres as the hot gas inside them cools down.
Published: 9 January 2019
ESA's Gaia mission has made a major breakthrough in unravelling the formation history of the Milky Way. Instead of forming alone, our Galaxy merged with another large galaxy early in its life, around 10 billion years ago.
Published: 31 October 2018
A team of astronomers using the latest set of data from ESA's Gaia mission to look for high-velocity stars being kicked out of the Milky Way were surprised to find stars instead sprinting inwards – perhaps from another galaxy.
Published: 2 October 2018
Using data from ESA's Gaia stellar surveyor, astronomers have identified four stars that are possible places of origin of 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object spotted during a brief visit to our Solar System in 2017.
Published: 25 September 2018
ESA's star mapping mission, Gaia, has shown our Milky Way galaxy is still enduring the effects of a near collision that set millions of stars moving like ripples on a pond.
Published: 19 September 2018
The mass of a very young exoplanet has been revealed for the first time using data from ESA's star mapping spacecraft Gaia and its predecessor, the quarter-century retired Hipparcos satellite.
Published: 20 August 2018
ESA's Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy.
Published: 25 April 2018

Gaia's first data release was not designed to be a full database with which major scientific discoveries could be made. Instead it was foreseen much more as a set of test data that astronomers could practice on and get ready for the second release from ESA's billion-star surveyor – the one that would feature a billion parallaxes and proper...

Published: 20 April 2018
19-Mar-2024 02:44 UT

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