Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. Originally from Prague, the Czech Republic, she spent the first seven years of her career working as a reporter, script-writer and presenter for various TV programmes of the Czech Public Service Television. She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master's in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor's in Journalism and Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Prague's Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency.
, astronomers can model the past trajectories of those stars and essentially play the movie of the Milky Way backward and forward millions, or even billions, of years. But that was already possible with the previously released data. With the new data set, astronomers will be able to look for more.
For the first time, the Gaia mission team will release what they call"astrophysical parameters" for half a billion stars. These parameters, derived from the light spectra of the stars measured by Gaia , reveal information about the chemical composition, mass, age, temperature and brightness of each of the measured stars. And that is a big deal, Gaia project scientist Jos de Bruijne told Space.com."You will really get to know the stars," De Bruijne said.
For 30 million of these stars, Gaia measured the chemical composition of stellar atmospheres, which is identical to the chemical composition of the molecular clouds that these stars were born in billions of years ago, De Bruijne said. By combining the information about chemical composition with the modeling of the stellar trajectories, astronomers will be able to track groups of stars to their birthplaces inside the Milky Way.
"It's really unique that we now can do this with such a high number of stars," De Bruijne said."That's something that is otherwise really difficult and expensive to do with ground-based telescopes, as it takes a lot of time." Although Gaia has been scanning the Milky Way since 2014, there is still a lot astronomers don't understand about the galaxy. Studying our galactic home is not an easy task.
But through the gradual improvements in Gaia data — and with the help of other observation techniques, such as radio astronomy — the big picture is coming together, piece by piece. That means we're getting closer to solving some of the great puzzles, including the distribution of
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