Gaia making a 3D-map of a Billion stars, new space observatory Options

[dtolman]

New posted paper is claiming that Gaia will be able to detect 20,000 jupiter mass planets (15-27k technically) over its 5 year mission, and some 70,000 (!) over a 10 year extended mission. For reference, there are around 2000 known exoplanets as of today - and most of those are from the Kepler mission... amazing to think it'll increase by an order of magnitude over a decade. Gaia currently records information on 40 million stars a day - according to a recent tweet approaching 10 billion observed over the mission.

[SteveM]

Gaia's Data Release 1, based on observations between 25 July 2014 and 16 September 2015, is due out Wednesday. It includes preliminary positions for over 1 billion stars and preliminary positions, parallax, and proper motions for over 2 million stars. Contents summarized at ESA's Gaia DR1.

[antipode]

Wow, Look at the LMC in the hi res png file at

http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/...rst_sky_map.png

No doubt about its spiral structure there!

P

[SteveM]

No doubt about its spiral structure there!

And the LMC also shows rotation. Arrticle available through ArXiv..

[Holder of the Tw...]

One of the more entertaining ESA products to come out of the Gaia release is this newly posted YouTube video showing how the Orion constellation will evolve over time:

Orion from now till 450000 AD

No corrections made for Betelgeuse possibly blowing up (whose timing is unknown in any event). Also notice the Hyades star cluster moving in.

Another earlier YouTube from ESA showed an approximation for the whole sky for five million years.

Future of Two Million Stars

Recommend going full screen on both of these.

[Holder of the Tw...]

Heads up. The astrometry revolution is about to start.

Gaia's second data release is coming up on April 25th. It will have 22 months worth of observations crunched into it. None of it will be relying on Hipparcos data anymore, it will be purely self contained.

Here is a description:

Gaia DR2

In other news the spacecraft had a hiccup back in February when it went into safe mode for ten days. It was a transponder problem, and there is some concern it could reoccur.

Enough data has already been gathered to date in order to have a Data Release 3 in late 2020. That should be the last release before the final catalog. That is, unless they extend the mission.