We will go beyond what we can see to understand reality. We are going to discover completely new things, things we would think are impossible
- Gerry Gilmore
Gazing into the sky on a starry night, don’t be deceived by the apparent peace and tranquillity above you. The celestial ballet of stars that dance and flicker gently to the human eye are raging and burning in the near vacuum of space, living and dying with a beauty, ferocity and magnificence that is almost impossible to comprehend.
The Milky Way, home to planet Earth as it sweeps around the Sun at 67,000mph, is so vast it defies normal explanation. We know how many stars there are – more than 100 billion – because we can count them in the sky. But how do we know how far away they are, or how old, or how they differ in size and shape, and how do we know what other objects and matter make up the celestial puzzle?
Yesterday (Thurs), a rocket blasted into the sky from a launch site in French Guiana and travelled 1.5 million km to reach its destination in orbit around the Sun. The spacecraft is called Gaia. Its mission, funded by the European Space Agency and involving scientists from across Europe, is to make the largest, most precise, three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever attempted.
It will be a census of a billion stars spread across our galaxy. The results, says Professor Gerry Gilmore from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy (IoA) and the Principal Investigator for UK involvement in the mission, “will revolutionise our understanding of the cosmos as never before.”
See a video and read the full story
Image:Gaia satellite
Credit: Jonathan Settle
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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