Mark McCaughrean on Nostr: But beyond underpinning everyone else’s science, Gaia is delivering a bounty of its ...
But beyond underpinning everyone else’s science, Gaia is delivering a bounty of its own.
By essentially tracing the positions & motions backwards in time, it is changing the way we understand how our Milky Way galaxy was formed over billions of years through mergers of smaller ones, & tracing the large-scale structures of star formation as they ripple across across the galaxy today.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Gaia_unravels_the_ancient_threads_of_the_Milky_Way#:~:text=ESA's%20Gaia%20space%20telescope%20has,form%20the%20infant%20Milky%20Way
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_wave
By essentially tracing the positions & motions backwards in time, it is changing the way we understand how our Milky Way galaxy was formed over billions of years through mergers of smaller ones, & tracing the large-scale structures of star formation as they ripple across across the galaxy today.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Gaia_unravels_the_ancient_threads_of_the_Milky_Way#:~:text=ESA's%20Gaia%20space%20telescope%20has,form%20the%20infant%20Milky%20Way
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_wave