Europe Has Added 1.1 Billion Stars To Its Milky Way Map (vice.com)

Ben Sullivan, writing for Motherboard: The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the first batch of data from its Gaia star mapping project -- a mission that is currently on track to chart one billion stars in the Milky Way. The space telescope launched in 2013 and its first data dump contains the precise celestial position and brightness of a mammoth 1,142 million stars. The release also contains the distances and movements for more than two million stars so far. ESA's director of science Alvaro Gimenez told a press conference held at the European Space Astronomy Centre in Spain on Wednesday morning that the data release features around 490 billion astrometric, 118 billion photometric, and 10 billion spectroscopic measurements. "[The] Final survey will contain [around] 250,000 Solar System Objects, 1,000,000 galaxies, and 500,000 quasars," said Gimenez. Those numbers are almost unimaginable, but ESA has used the data so far to form an "all-sky" view of the stars in our galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on Gaia's observations from July 2014 to September 2015.

Comments

Re:Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

If we use the definition of "Earth-like" that we use with exoplanets then we've got 3... Venus and Mars both rocky planets in the habitable zone.... Though I wouldn't recommend trying to habbitate either without a protective suit or 10....

Re:Is there a new track?

[bruce_the_loon]

We fell into the thousand separator trap. The 1,142 million is actually 1142 million or 1.142 billion. The article has the non-separator number which is more globally recognized.

Parallax

[Sebastopol]

After reading the historical book "Parallax: The race to measure the cosmos", I'm in awe of this machine. It took millennia and massive improvements in lens making technology and machining for astronomers to measure the first star's distance. Now a satellite can nail down a billion. Just amazing.