Soyuz VS06 upper composite, Gaia space observatory, was transferred to the pad and installed inside the mobile gantry on 14 December 2013.
Soyuz VS06 will lift off on 19 December 2013 from Europe's Spaceport, French Guiana.

ESA’s Gaia mission will produce an unprecedented 3D map of our Galaxy by mapping, with exquisite precision, the position and motion of a billion stars.

More on Gaia: www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Gaia

Credits: ESA–M. Pedoussaut

Tags:   Kourou France Gaia Soyuz VS06 Upper composite

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This image shows an artistic impression of the Milky Way, and on top of that an overlay showing the location and densities of a young star sample from Gaia’s data release 3 (in yellow-green). The “you are here” sign points towards the Sun.

The density of the star sample out to 5 kpc (~ 16 300 light years) from the Sun is provided on this image in the form of isodensity surfaces. The isodensity surfaces provide insight into the structure of our galaxy. The higher the density, the more young stars are found in this area. See more versions and read more about this map here.

Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Tags:   Astronomy Milky Way Stars Space Universe Cosmos Space Science Science Space technology tech Technology News GaiaDR3 Gaia Data Release 3 Gaia Mission European Space Agency

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The region around double cluster h Persei and chi Persei (also known as NGC 869 and NGC 884) as viewed by ESA’s Gaia satellite using information from the mission’s second data release.

This stellar system comprises two open clusters of a relatively young age, around 12.8 million years old. Together with their surroundings, these two clusters contain enough mass to account for at least 20,000 stars as massive as the Sun.

The view is not a photograph but was compiled by mapping the total density of stars detected by Gaia in each pixel.

Acknowledgement: Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); A. Moitinho / A. F. Silva / M. Barros / C. Barata, University of Lisbon, Portugal; H. Savietto, Fork Research, Portugal.

Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Tags:   ESA European Space Agency Space Universe Cosmos Space Science Science Space Technology Tech Technology Gaia Stars Star Map GaiaDR2 Milky way Milky Way Perseus Cluster Double Cluster

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An all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. The map shows the density of stars observed by Gaia in each portion of the sky between July 2014 to May 2016.

Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer stars are observed. In contrast to the brightness map in colour, which is dominated by the brightest and most massive stars, this view shows the distribution of all stars, including faint and distant ones.

The bright horizontal structure that dominates the image is the Galactic plane, the flattened disc that hosts most of the stars in our home Galaxy, with the Galactic centre in the middle.

The elongated feature visible below the Galactic centre and pointing in the downwards direction is the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, a small satellite of the Milky Way that is leaving a stream of stars behind as an effect of our Galaxy’s gravitational tug. This faint feature is only visible in this view, and not in the all-sky map based on the luminosity of stars, which is dominated by bright sources.

Darker regions across the Galactic plane correspond to foreground clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which absorb the light of stars located further away, behind the clouds. Many of these conceal stellar nurseries where new generations of stars are being born.

Sprinkled across the image are also many globular and open clusters – groupings of stars held together by their mutual gravity, as well as entire galaxies beyond our own.

The two bright objects in the lower right of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Other nearby galaxies are also visible, most notably the Milky Way’s largest galactic neighbour the Andromeda galaxy (also known as M31), seen in the lower left of the image along with its satellite, the Triangulum galaxy (M33).

A number of artefacts are also visible on the image in the form of curved features and darker stripes, though in much lesser extent with respect to Gaia’s first map of the sky, which was based on only 14 months of the satellite’s data. These features are not of astronomical origin but rather reflect Gaia’s scanning procedure, and will gradually fade away as more data are gathered during the five-year mission.

The second Gaia data release was made public on 25 April 2018 and includes the position and brightness of almost 1.7 billion stars, and the parallax, proper motion and colour of more than 1.3 billion stars. It also includes the radial velocity of more than seven million stars, the surface temperature of more than 100 million and other astrophysical parameters of 70–80 million stars. There are also more than 500 000 variable sources, and the position of 14 099 known Solar System objects – most of them asteroids – included in the release.

Acknowledgement: Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); A. Moitinho / A. F. Silva / M. Barros / C. Barata, University of Lisbon, Portugal; H. Savietto, Fork Research, Portugal.

Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Tags:   ESA European Space Agency Space Universe Cosmos Space Science Science Space Technology Tech Technology Gaia Stars Star Map GaiaDR2 Milky way Milky Way Density Map Density Star Desity

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ESA’s Gaia data release 3 shows us the speed at which more than 30 million Milky Way stars move towards or away from us. This is called ‘radial velocity’ and it is providing the third velocity dimension in the Gaia map of our galaxy. Together with the proper motions of stars (movement across the sky), we can now see how the stars move over a large portion of the Milky Way.

This sky map shows the velocity field of the Milky Way for ~26 million stars. The colours show the radial velocities of stars along the line-of-sight. Blue shows the parts of the sky where the average motion of stars is towards us and red shows the regions where the average motion is away from us. The lines visible in the figure trace out the motion of stars projected on the sky (proper motion). These lines show how the direction of the speed of stars varies by galactic latitude and longitude. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) are not visible as only stars with well defined distances were selected to make this image.

Read more about Gaia's data release 3 here.

Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Tags:   Astronomy Milky Way Stars Space Universe Cosmos Space Science Science Space technology tech Technology News GaiaDR3 Gaia Data Release 3 Gaia Mission European Space Agency Milky Way in motion

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