Tag : Asteroids

Washington: According to a study by the University of Helsinki, the European Gaia space mission has produced an unprecedented amount of new, improved, and detailed data for almost two billion objects in the Milky Way galaxy and the surrounding cosmos. The Gaia Data Release 3 on Monday revolutionizes our knowledge of the Solar System and the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies. The Gaia space mission of the European Space Agency ESA is constructing an ultraprecise three-dimensional map of our Milky Way galaxy, observing almost two billion stars or roughly one percent of all the stars in our galaxy. Gaia was launched in December 2013 and has collected science data from July 2014. On Monday, June 13, ESA released Gaia data in Data Release 3 (DR3). Finnish researchers were strongly involved in the release. Gaia data allows, for example, for the derivation of asteroid and exoplanet orbits and physical properties. The data helps unveil the origin and future evolution of the Solar System and the Milky Way and helps understand stellar and planetary-system evolution and our place in the cosmos. Gaia revolves about its axis slowly in about six hours and is composed of two optical space telescopes. Three science instruments allow for accurate determination of stellar positions and velocities as well as the spectral properties. Gaia resides at about 1,5 million kilometers from the Earth in the anti-Sun direction, where it orbits the Sun together with the Earth in the proximity of the so-called Sun-Earth Lagrange L2-point. Gaia DR3 on June 13, 2022 was significant across astronomy. Some 50 scientific articles are being published with DR3, of which nine articles have been devoted to underscoring the exceptionally significant potential of DR3 fo ...