Gaia
A Huge New Gaia Data Release: More Stars, Gravitational Lenses and Asteroids
The ESA's Gaia mission is releasing a new tranche of astronomical data. The mission has released three regular, massive hauls…
The Milky Way has Trapped the Large Magellanic Cloud With its Gravity. What Comes Next?
Our galaxy’s largest nearby companion is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy visible to the naked eye in…
Not Just Stars. Gaia Mapped a Diverse and Shifting Universe of Variable Objects
We've reported on Gaia's incredible data-collection abilities in the past. Recently, it released DR3, its latest data set, with over…
Gaia Could Detect Free-Floating Black Holes Passing Near Stars in the Milky Way
The thing with black holes is they're hard to see. Typically we can only detect their presence when we can…
ESA’s Gaia Just Took a Picture of L2 Neighbor JWST
Oh, hello there new neighbor! In February, the Gaia spacecraft took a picture of its new closest companion in space…
Gaia Finds Ancient Satellite Galaxy Pontus Embedded in Milky Way
A recent study looked at stellar streams hidden in Gaia’s data, to uncover a torturous past.
“Ain’t like Dusting Crops!” How We’ll Actually Navigate Interstellar Space
May the 4th be With You! Blasting out of Mos Eisley Space Port, the Millennium Falcon carries our adventurers off…
New All-Sky Map of the Milky Way’s Galactic Halo
The outer reaches of the Milky Way galaxy are a different place. Stars are much harder to come by, with…
Our Part of the Galaxy is Packed with Binary Stars
Binary star systems are everywhere. They make up a huge percentage of all known solar systems: from what we can…
The Solar System Might Not Exist if There Wasn’t a Huge Galactic Collision with the Milky Way Billions of Years Ago
The Milky Way has a number of satellite galaxies; nearly 60 of them, depedending on how we define them. One…