We are moving beyond just seeing to knowing about the galaxy in which we live.
— Gerry Gilmour
The Gaia satellite, which orbits the sun at a distance of 1.5million km from the earth, was launched by the European Space Agency in December 2013 with the aim of observing a billion stars and revolutionising our understanding of the Milky Way.
The unique mission is reliant on the work of Cambridge researchers who collect the vast quantities of data transmitted by Gaia to a data processing centre at the university, overseen by a team at the Institute of Astronomy.
Since the start of its observations in August 2014, Gaia has recorded 272 billion positional (or astrometric) measurements and 54.4 billion brightness (or photometric) data points.
Gaia surveys stars and many other astronomical objects as it spins, observing circular swathes of the sky. By repeatedly measuring the positions of the stars with extraordinary accuracy, Gaia can tease out their distances and motions throughout the Milky Way galaxy.
Dr Francesca de Angeli, lead scientist at the Cambridge data centre, said: “The huge Gaia photometric data flow is being processed successfully into scientific information at our processing centre and has already led to many exciting discoveries.”
The Gaia team have spent a busy year processing and analysing data, with the aim of developing enormous public catalogues of the positions, distances, motions and other properties of more than a billion stars. Because of the immense volumes of data and their complex nature, this requires a huge effort from expert scientists and software developers distributed across Europe, combined in Gaia’s Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC).
“The past 12 months have been very intense, but we are getting to grips with the data, and are looking forward to the next four years of operations,” said Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist at ESA.
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Image: Artist’s impression of Gaia14aae
Credit: Marisa Grove/Institute of Astronomy
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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