The European Space Agency released the largest ever full-sky survey of celestial objects last week — a map of two million stars and data on their distances and motions through the sky. The release is the first batch of more than one billion that the agency hopes to catalog using its Gaia satellite in the coming year.
“Gaia is at the forefront of astrometry, charting the sky at precisions that have never been achieved before,” Alvaro Giménez, ESA’s Director of Science, said in a press release. “Today’s release gives us a first impression of the extraordinary data that await us and that will revolutionize our understanding of how stars are distributed and move across our Galaxy.” – READ MORE
