The European Space Agency (ESA)’s Gaia space observatory spent 22 months conducting a comprehensive survey of 1.7 billion stars in our sky, creating the most detailed star catalog to date.
The data, which was released on April 25 and will appear in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics, is expected to contribute to countless discoveries over the course of its analysis.
From July 2014 to May 2016, Gaia logged the positions, motions, and distances of over one billion stars, analyzed surrounding dwarf galaxies, and took measurements of stars outside of the Milky Way galaxy.
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