The astronomer community will be able to draw on Monday from the organ’s third data collection, a harvest, accompanied by about fifty scientific articles, listing a number of celestial bodies.
Functional telescope since 2013
The closest, with over 150,000 asteroids in our solar system, whose orbital instrument was calculated with incomparable accuracy. Makes new measurements for more than 1.8 billion stars in our galaxy, says Maynard. And outside of this galaxy, groups of other galaxies and distant quasars. Launched on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA), Gaia has been operating since 2013 and is located in a privileged location, called L2, one and a half million kilometers from Earth, facing the Sun. Gaia scans the sky and records everything she sees. » – Excerpt from Misha Haywood, astronomer at the PSL Paris Observatory It detects and observes a very small fraction (only 1%) of the stars in our galaxy, which are 100,000 light-years in diameter. But he designs more than just a map. Its two telescopes are connected by a multibillion-pixel photographic sensor, with commercial cameras numbering in the millions. Three instruments of astronomy, photometry and spectroscopy will interpret and then retrieve real photons and light signals. Thanks to this, it provides global monitoring of the positions of what is moving in the sky. this is the first time. Before Gaia, we had a very limited view of the galaxy. » – Excerpt from Misha Haywood, astronomer at the PSL Paris Observatory before Gaia? It was Hipparcos, the satellite that revolutionized observation after its launch by the European Space Agency in 1997, recording more than 110,000 celestial bodies. With Gaia, astronomers can access not only the positions and movements of a large number of stars, but also the measurements of their physical and chemical characteristics, and most importantly, their age. A lot of information that tells us about their evolution in the past and therefore about the evolution of the galaxy is explained by astronomer Paula Di Matteo, Misha Haywood Fellow at the Observatoire de Paris-PSL. It is also one of the reasons for building Gaia, the astronomer continues. Stars have a peculiarity that has existed for billions of years. So their measurement is similar to that of a fossil that tells us about the state of the galaxy at the time of its formation. » – Excerpt from Paula Di Matteo, astronomer This overview of the movements of the stars in the Galaxy has already led to important discoveries. With the second list, delivered in 2018, astronomers were able to show that our galaxy was incorporated another ten billion years ago. The catalog has generated thousands of scholarly articles since its first release in 2016. The data stream requires a specialized soil treatment chain, DPAC, which calls in supercomputers for six European computing centers, mobilizing 450 specialists, explains François Menard, who was responsible. Without this treatment kit, there would be no work because Gaia produces 700 million starfish, 150 million photometers and 14 million spectra every day. A torrent of raw human-only data algorithms Turn them into measurements that can be used by astronomers. It will take five years for this third list of observations to be delivered from 2014 to 2017. And we will have to wait until 2030 for the final version, when Gaia will complete the site scan in 2025.
