Astronomers are going gaga over Gaia.
The April 25 release of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which cataloged nearly 1.7 billion stars, has kicked off a scientific spree, with multiple papers published online in the last two weeks at arXiv.org.
Charting stars in the Milky Way and beyond, Gaia surveys the entire sky. The spacecraft can measure stars’ motions and distances (SN Online: 4/25/18), properties which haven’t been inventoried on such a large scale before. “It’s really opening new dimensions in how we view stars,” says astronomer Ana Bonaca of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.