Made a 3D map of the Milky Way

The European satellite "Gea" made it possible to three-dimensionally map almost 1,7 billion stars in our galaxy and determine the distance from Earth for 1,3 billion, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced.

"It is a very rich data set and we think it will fundamentally change astronomy and our understanding of the Milky Way," said one of the lead scientists at ESA Uve Lamers.

The director of the scientific department of ESA Ginter Hassinger said that with the help of "Gee" it will be possible to reconstruct the entire history of our galaxy.

"It's like doing archaeo-astronomy (...) to reconstruct the true history of our universe," he said.

The "Gea" satellite was launched at the end of 2013 and records light sources in the Milky Way. It is currently located 1,5 million kilometers from Earth, and its data is sent to Earth, where it is processed by 450 scientists from 20 countries.

The first version of the catalog obtained from "Gaia" data was compiled in 2016 and includes the position of 1,1 billion stars of the Milky Way, but the distance was determined for only two million and that imprecisely.

French astronomer Frédéric Arenau said that the catalog was "only an aperitif".

"Now this is a real firework. When you know the distance between the stars, then you can know how bright they are, how old they are, how they evolved," Arena explained.

New data collected by "Gea" from July 2014 to May 2016 has been published on the Internet and can be accessed.

The Milky Way is a bridged spiral galaxy in which our Solar System is located. The name "Milky" is derived from the appearance of the galaxy from Earth - a bright band seen in the night sky formed by stars that cannot be individually distinguished with the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin name via lactea, which was derived from the Greek name γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos, "milky circle"). From Earth, the Milky Way looks like a sphere because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from the inside. Galileo Galileo was the first to resolve a band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610.