Europe's Gaia space camera tracks everything that shines or moves in our Milky Way galaxy.
Europe's Gaia telescope dropped its latest batch of data on Monday as it seeks to assemble the largest catalogue of light sources in the sky.Stars, asteroids and distant, bright galaxies - anything that can be visibly pinpointed is having its vital statistics measured by the observatory.
This is especially important when trying to measure distances to objects, which Gaia achieves by tracking how these targets wobble ever so slightly on the sky as it circles the Sun - a neat form of trigonometry that has now been practised on 1.8 billion stars in, or very near, our Milky Way galaxy. Gaia is making repeat observations to reduce measurement errors down to seven micro-arcseconds for the very brightest stars
Combined with their previously established movement across the sky, this means we now have their full three-dimensional behaviour. One of the most surprising discoveries coming out of the new data is the recognition that Gaia can do so-called asteroseismology. This is the study of stars' subtle surface resonances, which enable scientists to pull out information such as how big a star is and how old it is.
"So far, these stars have been more like candidates, because the Gaia accuracy has not been sufficient [to fully understand them], but I'm sure astronomers will be ready with their queries to attack the new Gaia data."
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