The European Space Agency released the most accurate census yet of stars in the Milky Way and neighbouring galaxies Wednesday, providing astronomers with a wealth of new data for further research.
The high-precision measurements about the distance, motion, brightness and colour of almost 1.7 billion stars were collected by the space agency’s Gaia probe between July 2014 and May 2016.
Hundreds of scientists and software engineers took years to process the data and create a catalogue of stars from which they were able to generate maps, including of the asteroids in our solar system and even a three-dimensional chart of some nearby stars.
The Gaia spacecraft collected high-precision measurements about the distance, motion, brightness and colour of
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