Gaia is the mission of ESA, the European Space Agency, to create the most accurate and complete multidimensional map of the Milky Way. It recently released a new treasure trove of data on the Milky Way – which describes strange ‘starquakes’, stellar DNA, asymmetrical motions and other fascinating insights.
This dataset contains the most comprehensive list of binary stars, asteroids and planetary moons in the Solar System, as well as millions of galaxies and quasars outside the Milky Way.
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Gaia’s ability to identify starquakes is one of the most impressive findings of the new data. A starquake is vaguely similar to an earthquake that changes the shape of stars. These earthquakes reveal more about the inner workings of the star.
In thousands of stars, Gaia has discovered intense non-radial earthquakes. It also revealed unusual vibrations in stars that had never been observed before. According to current theory, these stars shouldn’t have earthquakes; however, Gaia detected them on its surface.
The DNA of the Stars
The composition of stars can potentially tell about their birthplace and their later journey, hence the Milky Way’s history. With today’s data release, Gaia is revealing the largest chemical map of the galaxy coupled with 3D motion, from our solar neighborhood to the smaller galaxies that surround our own.
Some stars consist of heavier metals. Upon death, these stars release these metals into the gas and dust between the stars, called the interstellar medium, from which new stars form. The formation and death of active stars generate a metal-enriched environment. Thus, a star’s chemical makeup is similar to its DNA, giving us crucial information about its origin.
Gaia also revealed stars with primordial material. Metals are more abundant in stars closer to the center and plane of the galaxy than in stars farther away. Based on their chemical composition, Gaia was able to identify stars that originated in galaxies other than our own.
Alejandra Recio-Blanco of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, a member of the Gaia collaboration, said: “Our galaxy is a beautiful melting pot of stars. This diversity is extremely important because it tells us the story of our galaxy’s formation. It reveals the processes of migration within our galaxy and accretion of outer galaxies. It also shows that our Sun and we all belong to an ever-changing system, formed thanks to the assemblage of stars and gases from different sources.”
A new binary star catalog details the mass and history of more than 800,000 binary systems, while a new asteroid study of 156,000 rocky bodies reveals more about the origins of our Solar System. Gaia also discovers about 10 million variable stars, enigmatic macromolecules between stars and quasars and galaxies beyond our cosmic neighborhood.
Timo Prusti, Project Gaia Scientist at ESA, said: “Unlike other missions that target specific objects, Gaia is a research mission. This means that Gaia is bound to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss by searching the entire sky with billions of stars over and over again. This is one of its strengths, and we can’t wait for the astronomy community to delve into our new data to discover more about our galaxy and its surroundings than we could have imagined.”
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