Gaia Archives

June 27, 2022June 27, 2022 by Andy Tomaswick

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 detect their gravitational pull. And if there are rogue black holes simply traveling throughout the galaxy and not tied to another luminous astronomical, it would be fiendishly hard to detect them. But now we have a new potential data set to do so.

Gaia just released its massive 3rd data set that contains astrometry data for over 1.5 billion stars, about 1% of the total number of stars in the galaxy. According to a new paper by Jeff Andrews of the University of Florida and Northwestern University, it might be possible for Gaia to detect perturbances caused by a rogue black hole briefly interacting with one of the 1.5 billion stars in the catalog. Unfortunately, it’s just not very likely that any such interaction actually took place during Gaia’s observing time.

March 17, 2022March 17, 2022 by Nancy Atkinson

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 at the second Lagrangian point, the James Webb Space Telescope.

Gaia is an optical telescope that is mapping out our galaxy by surveying the motions of more than a thousand million stars. Astronomers for the mission realized that once JWST reached L2, it would be in Gaia’s field of view. It spied JWST when the two spacecraft were a million km apart.

February 23, 2022February 23, 2022 by David Dickinson

Gaia Finds Ancient Satellite Galaxy Pontus Embedded in Milky Way

Artist's impression of the ESA's Gaia Observatory. Credit: ESA

A recent study looked at stellar streams hidden in Gaia data, to uncover evidence of an ancient remnant dubbed Pontus.

Our home galaxy the Milky Way is a monster with a ravenous past. In its estimated 12 billion years of existence, our galaxy has swallowed smaller satellite galaxies whole, with collisions resulting in massive rounds of star formation. We see threads of these remnant mergers as streams of stars and clusters, strung out around the Milky Way.

May 4, 2021May 4, 2021 by Matthew Cimone

“Ain’t like Dusting Crops!” How We’ll Actually Navigate Interstellar Space

Simulated Hyperspace Travel — We're not at Hyperspace yet, but the next gen of interstellar space craft might be traveling at a good fraction of the speed of light c. - SpaceEngine by Author

May the 4^th be With You!

Blasting out of Mos Eisley Space Port, the Millennium Falcon carries our adventurers off Tatooine bringing Luke Skywalker across the threshold into space. With Imperial Star Destroyers closing, Luke bemoans Han Solo’s delay in jumping to Hyperspace. It takes time to make these calculations through the Falcon’s “Navicomputer.” Han explains that otherwise they could “fly right through a star” or “bounce too close to a supernova.” (probably the same effect of each – also are supernovas bouncy?)

Celestial calculations are needed to figure out where you’re going. In Star Wars these are done by ship computers, or later by trusty astromech droids like R2-D2. But, for the first time, simulations have been conducted of an uncrewed ship’s ability to autonavigate through interstellar space. While not at Hyperspace speeds, the simulations do account for velocities at up to half the speed of light. Created by Coryn A.L. Bailer-Jones of the Max Plank Institute for Astronomy, these simulations may be our first step to creating our own “Navicomputers” (or R2-D2s if they have a personality).

The most distant object we’ve ever sent into space, Voyager1, was launched in 1977 (same year as the release of Star Wars). It took 4 decades to leave the solar system. The next generation of interstellar craft may be far faster but also need their own way to navigate
c. NASA

May 4, 2021May 4, 2021 by Andy Tomaswick

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 most of this “galactic halo” being made up of empty space. But scientists theorize that there is an abundance of one particular thing in this desolate area – dark matter. Now, a team from Harvard and the University of Arizona (UA) spent some time studying and modeling one of the galaxy’s nearest neighbors to try to tease out more information about that dark matter, and as a result came up with an all new way to look at the halo itself.

February 24, 2021February 24, 2021 by Scott Alan Johnston

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 tell, about half of all Sun-like stars have a binary partner. But we haven’t really had a chance to study them in detail yet. That’s about to change. Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, a research team has just compiled a gigantic new catalog of nearby binary star systems, and it shows that at least 1.3 million of them exist within 3000 light-years of Earth.

May 27, 2020May 27, 2020 by Evan Gough

The Solar System Might Not Exist if There Wasn’t a Huge Galactic Collision with the Milky Way Billions of Years Ago

Artist's conception of a solar system in formation. It's likely that exoplanet formation around other stars proceeded similarly. Credit: NASA/FUSE/Lynette Cook

The Milky Way has a number of satellite galaxies; nearly 60 of them, depedending on how we define them. One of them, called the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy (Sgr d Sph), may have played a huge role when it comes to humans, our world and our little civilization. A collision between the Milky Way and the Sgr d Sph may have created the Solar System itself.

November 15, 2019November 15, 2019 by Evan Gough

Tatooines everywhere? Many of the Exoplanets Already Discovered are in Multi-Star Systems

These images show some of the exoplanet host stars with companion stars (B, C) that were found during the project. The images are RGB composite images taken with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS) in the y- (960 nm), i- (760 nm), and g-band (480 nm). The image in the middle shows a hierarchical triple star system. Image: Mugrauer, PanSTARRS

Right now, we know of about 4,000 confirmed exoplanets, mostly thanks to the Kepler mission. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, will likely raise that 4000 by a lot. But what about the stars that all of these planets orbit?

A new study from the Astrophysical Institute and University Observatory of the University of Jena identified over 200 exoplanets that exist in multiple star systems. The study is part of the effort to understand how host stars shape the formation and evolution of planets.

March 15, 2019March 15, 2019 by Evan Gough

This Star has been Kicked Out of the Milky Way. It Knows What It Did.

Researchers from the University of Michigan confirm that a runaway star was ejected from the Milky Way's disk rather than the galactic core. Image Credit: Kohei Hattori

Every once in a while, the Milky Way ejects a star. The evicted star is typically ejected from the chaotic area at the center of the galaxy, where our Super Massive Black Hole (SMBH) lives. But at least one of them was ejected from the comparatively calm galactic disk, a discovery that has astronomers rethinking this whole star ejection phenomenon.

February 12, 2019February 12, 2019 by Evan Gough

Thanks to Gaia, We Now Know Exactly When We’ll be Colliding with Andromeda

The trajectories of the Milky Way, Andromeda, and the Triangulam galaxies. Image Credit: E. Patel, G. Besla (University of Arizona), R. van der Marel (STScI)

Astronomers have known for some time that the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies will collide on some future date. The best guess for that rendezvous has been about 3.75 billion years from now. But now a new study based on Data Release 2 from the ESA’s Gaia mission is bringing some clarity to this future collision.