Video Kidibot

Tag: star mapping

  • Gaia: Rewriting the story of the Milky Way

    Gaia: Rewriting the story of the Milky Way

    For over a decade, ESA’s Gaia mission has mapped our galaxy with stunning precision—rewriting the story of the Milky Way. As its mission enters a new phase, we look back at its most groundbreaking discoveries.

    Credit: ESA – European Space Agency

    Chapters:
    00:23 – Mapping the Milky Way and beyond
    00:58 – Structure of the Milky Way
    01:40 – Galactic family tree
    02:27 – Mapping star-forming regions
    03:00 – Ancient star streams
    03:19 – Cosmic encounters
    04:07 – Black holes and hidden giants

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  • Gaia leaves for retirement orbit

    Gaia leaves for retirement orbit

    From 25 July 2014 to 15 January 2025, the Gaia space observatory performed high-precision measurements of nearly two billion stars from its Lissajous orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, 1.5 million km from Earth.

    After 10.5 years of groundbreaking observations, Gaia’s cold gas supply for attitude control has been depleted. On 27 March 2025, Gaia will leave its Lissajous orbit and transition into a stable heliocentric orbit. Soon after, the spacecraft will be passivated, with its instruments and transmitters switched off.

    While Gaia will no longer collect new data, its scientific mission is far from over! The team continues working on Gaia Data Release 4 (expected 2026) and the final legacy catalogue (to be published not before the end of 2030), ensuring that Gaia’s discoveries will shape astronomy for decades to come.

    This video visualises how Gaia leaves its Lissajous orbit and enters its final heliocentric orbit.

    This video was made with Gaia Sky (https://gaiasky.space) by Tiago Nogueira, Toni Sagristà, and Stefan Jordan.

    Text: Stefan Jordan, Tiago Nogueira, Tineke Roegiers

    The creators would like to thank Alessandro Masat and Ander Martinez from ESA for providing Gaia’s orbit and attitude data.

    Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

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    We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.

    Copyright information about our videos is available here: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Terms_and_Conditions

  • First data from ESA’s Gaia mission

    First data from ESA’s Gaia mission

    Launched in December 2013, Gaia is destined to create the most accurate map yet of the Milky Way.

    By making accurate measurements of the positions and motions of roughly 1% of the total population of stars in the Milky Way, it will answer questions about the origin and evolution of our home galaxy.

    The first intermediate data release, containing, among other things, three-dimensional positions and two dimensional motions of a subset of two million stars, demonstrates that Gaia’s measurements are as precise as planned, paving the way to create the full map of one billion stars to be released towards the end of 2017.

    Find out more about Gaia:
    http://www.esa.int/gaia