Space: 500 thousand stars that have never been seen before, and the discovery of more than 156 thousand asteroids.. Here is the new map of the Gaia probe

On Tuesday, October 10, the Gaia space probe, dedicated to mapping the Milky Way, delivered its latest set of data that revealed nearly half a million new stars and unparalleledly determined the location of more than 150,000 asteroids.

A new vision of the Milky Way. After years of observation, the Gaia space probe has revealed its latest data: Nearly 500,000 new stars and 150,000 asteroids have been discovered, the European Space Agency announced Tuesday.

The European Space Agency’s telescope, which has been operating 1.5 million kilometers from Earth for 10 years, has provided, in its third catalog for 2022, the positions and movements of more than 1.8 billion stars, giving a fairly complete three-dimensional view of our galaxy.

But the European Space Agency explained, when publishing an intermediate catalogue, that there are still “gaps because Gaia has not fully explored regions of the sky that are particularly dense with stars”, called “globular clusters” in the space world.

Monitoring work lasts several years

This is now being done for the Gaia space probe, which selected the Omega Centauri cluster, the largest cluster that can be observed from Earth, as it was able to discover 500,000 new stars and approximately 156,000 asteroids in our solar system.

Thanks to a long observation period, lasting 66 months, the probe was able to calculate the orbital period of asteroids with accuracy “100 to 200 times better” than telescopes on Earth, according to François Menard, scientific director of “Gaia” at the National Space Center. studies.

For his part, Alexei Mints, co-author of the publication and member of the European Gaia Consortium, announced that this result exceeded the expectations of the European Space Agency and that it provided “a complete, large-scale map of Omega Centauri.”

According to the European Space Agency, observing these stars and mapping the Omega Centauri cluster are crucial steps for scientists who want to “confirm the age of our galaxy”, since the clusters, with extremely bright cores, are among the oldest objects in the galaxy. being.