• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Best Map Of The Milky Way Is Going To Get Better – By Tracking Almost 20 Billion Stars

August 20, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory has produced the most accurate map of the Milky Way, with the position and motion of almost 2 billion stars being used to better understand our galaxy’s present and past. However, teams are now looking at the future. One of them aims to conduct a follow-up mission that can re-observe what Gaia has seen and see where Gaia couldn’t, going into the infrared.

Advertisement

The incredible work of Gaia is ongoing – thanks to Gaia, for example, we know that the Milky Way absorbed several smaller galaxies many billion years ago – but with time the map will become more imprecise. In a few decades’ time, it will no longer be good enough for the kind of work that the spacecraft has gotten astronomers used to.

GaiaNIR (NIR stands for near-infrared) allows the observatory to see through the dust that features in the plane of the Milky Way. It will allow a better understanding of the dynamical processes at the core, in regions with a lot of star formation, and expand the measured number of stars by a factor of six if not ten.

“Even though Gaia is very brilliant and is revolutionizing everything, it’s really only measuring 1 percent of the galaxy,” GaiaNIR proposer Professor David Hobbs, from the University of Lund, told IFLScience. “The important thing about infrared, of course, is that all of the really dynamically interesting parts of the galaxy, they’re all lying in the galactic plane, and this is where all the dust is as well. Gaia is very good at seeing out of the galaxy, but it’s actually not that very good at seeing into the galaxy. It needs, in a sense, a pair of glasses to see through the dust, and that’s what the near-infrared detectors will allow.”

Not to be all Annie Get Your Gun about it, but the proposal sees GaiaNIR being able to do anything Gaia can do but better. We won’t be throwing away the incredible work done by Gaia – actually, building on it with a new mission is expected to push the precision up by a factor of 15. Such precision has long been sought in astrometry but it has remained elusive due to many challenges.

The team also hopes to include new instruments such as a spectrograph to gain even more insights into the stars and other objects that GaiaNIR will measure. Gaia has let scientists discover black holes, asteroids, and moons of asteroids, on top of measuring the position of stars and distant galaxies. It’s crucial to keep measuring many of these systems, as their motion changes in ways we can’t predict.

Advertisement

“If you don’t keep measuring them, they won’t be where you think they are in 20 years time,” Professor Hobbs continued. “The problem with this kind of mission is it’s very hard to summarize how many interesting things there are because there are so many of them. I mean, I can list off case after case after case, but there are just so many different cases.”

With boundless potential for discovery, the mission proposals for GaiaNIR hope for such a mission to be picked up. If it is selected, it will be sent into space in the 2040s, building on the still-growing legacy of its predecessor. 

Professor Hobbs presented details of the proposal at the XXXII International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Cape Town. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Get 50B of data for just £12 a month with this unbeatable Smarty SIM only deal
  2. Zara owner Inditex sales rebound to top pre-pandemic levels
  3. Search for new Boston Fed to be ‘open’ amid calls for diversity
  4. The Psychology Of New Year’s Resolutions

Source Link: The Best Map Of The Milky Way Is Going To Get Better – By Tracking Almost 20 Billion Stars

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Dangerous Radiation Awaits Astronauts On Mars – New Mission Could Work Out Just How Much
  • A 4.9 Million-Year-Old Ecosystem Of Interconnected Worlds Is Preserved In A Tennessee Sinkhole
  • 100 Years Since The Scopes (Monkey) Trial: How Much Has Changed Since America’s “Trial Of The Century”?
  • Elephants Use All Kinds Of Gestures To Communicate – They Just Want Apples
  • NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Finds Evidence Of “Barrier” In The Sun’s 2 Million Kelvin Atmosphere
  • Watching Videos At Higher Speeds May Save Time But It Has Some Drawbacks
  • In 2008, Ukraine’s Space Agency Sent A Message To Planet Gliese 581c. It Will Arrive In 2029
  • In A First, A Robot Listened To Spoken Instructions And Performed Surgery – Just Like A Human Would
  • Newly Discovered “Bone-Digesting” Cells Help Burmese Pythons Consume Every Last Bit Of Their Prey
  • Gold Can Be Made By Scientists In A Lab – There’s Just One Problem
  • Recovery Of 24-Million-Year-Old Protein Fragments From Extinct Animal Opens “New Chapter” Of Biology
  • 6 Leading Medical Organizations Team Up To Sue RFK Jr Over COVID-19 Vaccine Policy
  • Less Ice, More Fire: Evidence Melting Glaciers Make Volcanic Eruptions More Explosive
  • This Mini Fridge-Sized Spacecraft Could Study A Time Of The Universe We’ve Never Seen Before
  • Psilocybin Shows Potential In Slowing Human Cell Aging And Increasing Lifespan In Mice
  • Blue Sharks’ Freaky Tooth-Skin Makes It Possible For Them To Change Color To Green And Even Gold
  • Summer In The Northern Hemisphere Will Be 15 Minutes Shorter Than Last Year’s
  • Your Ability To Be Funny May Not Be Inherited After All, And That’s Really Unexpected
  • New Interstellar Comet Tracked To Its Origin Region: “It’s Much Older Than The Solar System”
  • ChatGPT Gets “Absolutely Wrecked” By An Atari Video Chess Game Built In 1979
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version