gaia, mission of European Space Agency (ESA) is responsible for create the most accurate and comprehensive multidimensional map of the Milky Way, allowed to meet new, more detailed version of the Milky Way map.

Milky Way chemistry map

With new and improved details of nearly two billion stars compiledGaia revealed largest chemical map of the Milky Way combined with 3D motion, from our solar environment to the tiny galaxy that surrounds the Milky Way.

The Gaia data includes new information including the chemical composition, temperature of the star, color, mass, age, and speed of the star approaching or receding from Earth.

The data also incorporates special subsets of stars, such as stars that change in brightness over time.

Also new to this data set is the largest binary star catalog to date, thousands of Solar System objects such as asteroids and moons from planets, and millions of galaxies and quasars beyond Earth. Milky Way.

Gaia also reveals information about 10 million variable starsmysterious macromolecules between stars, as well as quasars and galaxies beyond our own cosmic environment.

One of the most surprising discoveries to emerge from the new data is that Gaia is able to detect earthquakes (small movements on the star’s surface) that change the shape of the star, something observatories did not initially do.

Although before, Gaia has discovered radial oscillation which causes the star to periodically swell and shrink, maintaining its spherical shape. Now Gaia has also detected another tremor that looks more like a large-scale tsunami. These nonradial oscillations change the overall shape of the star and are therefore more difficult to detect.

Gaia finds strong non-radial stellar earthquakes in thousands of starsand reveal such vibrations in stars rarely seen before, because these stars should not have vibrations according to current theory.

“Starquakes teach us a lot about stars, especially about how they work. Gaia opens a gold mine for massive star ‘asteroseismology’.” says Conny Aerts from England in Belgium, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration.

According to the ESA, most of the information is revealed by recently published data from spectroscopy, a technique in which starlight is broken up into its constituent colors (like a rainbow).

“Unlike other missions that target specific objects, Gaia is a reconnaissance mission. This means that while observing the entire sky with billions of stars multiple times, Gaia is sure to make discoveries that more dedicated missions would miss. This is one of his strengths.” Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist, said.

Why make a chemical map of the galaxy?

According to experts, some stars contain more “heavy metals” than others. During the Big Bang only the light elements (hydrogen and helium) were formed. All other heavier elements, called metals by astronomers, are built up inside stars.

When stars die, they release these metals into the gas and dust between the stars, called the interstellar medium, where new stars form.

It Active star formation and death will result in a more metal-rich environment. Therefore, the chemical composition of a star, which is somewhat similar to its DNA, provides important information about its origin.

“With Gaia, we see that some stars in our galaxy are made of primordial material, while others, like our Sun, are made of material enriched by previous generations of stars. Stars closer to the center and plane of our galaxy are richer in metal than stars farther away.” said the ESA in a press release.

• Gaia also identifies stars that originally came from galaxies other than our own, based on their chemical composition.