Charting the Galaxy - from Hipparcos to Gaia Pt. 1

In this sixth episode of the Science@ESA vodcast series Rebecca Barnes discovers the motions of the stars, learns how astronomers measure their distances and looks at the new European mission that will really get to grips with our place in the Universe.

Related news:
Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.
Combined with astrophysical information for each star, provided by on-board multi-colour photometry, these data will have the precision necessary to quantify the early formation, and subsequent dynamical, chemical and star formation evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Additional scientific products include detection and orbital classification of tens of thousands of extra-solar planetary systems, a comprehensive survey of objects ranging from huge numbers of minor bodies in our Solar System, through galaxies in the nearby Universe, to some 500 000 distant quasars. It will also provide a number of stringent new tests of general relativity and cosmology.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Gaia
• Hipparcos

[TonyS4870]

@TheFoggyB um no ô_O? I mean she's not ugly but cmon, hot?

[bjeh001]

Rebecca is my favorite star.

[TheFoggyB]

The Chick is Hot..Forget the Lesson