Do you remember the Gaia Mission? If you have followed FayerWayer In recent years you will remember that back in 2013 we excitedly reported this project carried out by the European Space Agency (ESA).
Gaia’s goal was simple but extremely ambitious: create a complete and detailed map of all the stars that make up the Milky Way.
Three years later, in 2016, we reported how the project had finally advanced enough to generate a first map, made up of more than a billion stars.
Clearly it was a somewhat imperfect 3D map, with a considerable number of holes, but it still represented the first of its kind.
Since then and to date it has become a reference for the community dedicated to the study of space, but more than anything it has served as a cornerstone.
Since throughout these years the map and the mission itself have been strengthened with new data that enriches everything thanks to the advancement of technology a decade later.
How the Gaia telescope found a million stars that were always there
When constructing that first map of the Milky Way it was necessary to observe more than 1.8 billion stars. Among all the challenges that scientists encountered during the process, there was one in particular that made clear the urgency to evolve science in this field: globular clusters.
These are those parts of space that are full of stars, forming a series of conglomerates where the brightness of some celestial bodies is much more predominant than that of others.
So researchers at the Gaia space observatory ultimately decided to orchestrate this particular study focused exclusively on these areas, based on previously collected data.
Collaborating with other scientists, they focused on the Omega Centauri cluster, about 17,090 light years from Earth, where they eventually found half a million new stars in that area alone, along with other cosmic objects so heavy that they are capable of deflecting light. .
The details of these findings have been reported by the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) in a special statement.
There they describe precisely how the brightest stars in clusters tend to outshine their fainter neighbors in their brightness.
Either because some are too close to others to define them or some other factors that hide them.
But now the Gaia telescope and the community have managed to put together a more realistic map of Omega Centauri:
This map is much more detailed and helps us better understand the order and composition of the universe today.