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Sky-scanning complete for Gaia

175 points by sohkamyung 3 days ago | 67 comments

NKosmatos 3 days ago

Direct link to some very very nice images and animations: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia

Two of my favorites: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/The_best_Milk...

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/01/The_best_M...

dylan604 3 days ago

I get how Gaia could make the best edge on image, but how could Gaia (or anything man made) get the the "best" face on image?

goodcanadian 3 days ago

The whole purpose of Gaia is to precisely measure the position of stars (and other objects). Once positions are known, a 3D model can be built. But how are the distances measured? The answer is parallax, essentially triangulation. You look for very small changes of position against the background sky. You use the width of the earth's orbit as the baseline and measure at different times of the year.

iAmAPencilYo 3 days ago

All of these are "Artist's Impressions". My best guess is they run a simulation based on the data from the spacecraft and then can pan the camera around as they see fit

BizarroLand 3 days ago

From the page:

[Image Description: A model image of what our home galaxy, the Milky Way, might look like edge-on, against a pitch-black backdrop. The Milky Way’s disc appears in the centre of the image, as a thin, dark-brown line spanning from left to right, with the hint of a wave in it. The line appears to be etched into a thin glowing layer of silver sand, that makes it look as if it was drawn with a coloured pencil on coarse paper. The bulge of the galaxy sits like a glowing, see-through pearl in the shape of a sphere in the centre of this brown line.]

hahajk 2 days ago

That's an AI produced accessibility description so I thought it seemed wrong. But more directly from the article text: This is a new artist’s impression of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope.

Cthulhu_ 2 days ago

Is it AI produced (if so, do they communicate it somewhere?) or do you believe it is?

Keysh 2 days ago

The face-on galaxy image is credited to Stefan Payne-Wardenaar (https://stefanpw.myportfolio.com/home), whose Twitter and Bluesky bios say, "I make astronomy visualizations in Blender."

dylan604 3 days ago

"The best Milky Way map, by Gaia (edge-on)"

The "by Gaia" implies the opposite to me. Unless the "artist's impressions" are from someone named Gaia???

Cthulhu_ 2 days ago

"This is a new artist’s impression of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope."

I'm sure you know of headlines vs details; when it comes down to it, space science relies on marketing to get some funding and interest in it, and using 100% accurate headlines is not good marketing.

sbierwagen 3 days ago

It can't. The galaxy is assumed to be roughly symmetrical, and they fill in the missing data with what we can see on our side of the galaxy. It's "best" in the sense that it's the most accurate fiction, I suppose.

Gaia is good to about 13,000 light years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Galaxymap.com,_map_12000_...

The Milky Way is maybe 100,000 light years in diameter. So we're only getting good distance readings on a small fraction, and nothing behind the central bulge of our galaxy. The first won't improve until we send an astrometry telescope way outside the orbit of the Earth, for better baselines, and the second is going to need a telescope sent 10,000 light years out of the galactic ecliptic.

thrance 3 days ago

We can infer the general distribution of mass on the other side of the galaxy from observing the trajectory of stars, can't we?

sbierwagen 3 days ago

It takes 230 million years for the Sun to make one full orbit around the Milky Way.

gunian 3 days ago

huh? how can sun orbit the milky way if it is within the milky way

dylan604 3 days ago

Around the center of the Milky Way. The sun orbits the center just like the planets orbit the sun.

gunian 3 days ago

is there some sort of gravitational body in the middle that makes everything orbit in galaxies? it must be massive right

sbierwagen 3 days ago

One of today's lucky ten thousand. Most galaxies have a black hole at the center that mass at least a hundred thousand times more than our sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole

SideburnsOfDoom 2 days ago

> mass at least a hundred thousand times more than our sun

The sun is 99.86% of the mass of solar system. So if you orbit the centre of mass of the solar system, you orbit the sun, more or less. Give or take a small correction for Jupiter.

But ... there are a lot more than a hundred thousand stars in the milky way. So if I guess right, the ratio of central mass vs the rest would be very different for the Milky way? It's more of a blob.

Even at "The current best estimate of its mass is 4.2 million solar masses" it does not dominate? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*

Cthulhu_ 2 days ago

It's not a singular source of gravity at the center though, it's the collection of all mass in the galaxy interacting with each other as well. Like a daisy chain of gravity, which explains why it looks like a spiral instead of an evenly distributed circle.

(I think anyway, I just made it up, I'm not learned in this area, just a HN shitposter)

SideburnsOfDoom 2 days ago

Right, not a point source and not exactly a blob either; more like swirls. I'm not learned in this area either.

gunian 3 days ago

does that mean all galaxies will eventually be consumed by the black holes at their center?

SideburnsOfDoom 2 days ago

No. Does this mean that solar systems will eventually be consumed by the stars at their centre, planets falling out of their orbits due to gravity? It does not. Gravity doesn't work like that.

The planets may be consumed, when the star runs out of fuel and swells a lot, and such is the Earth's fate. But that scenario is not one that happens to black holes.

NKosmatos 2 days ago

That’s one of the theories, called Big Crunch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Crunch

There are other (more probable) theories about the end of the universe, and if you’re up to it you can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

I’m in favor of the Big Chill, since I like the concept of entropy as introduced by the second law of thermodynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

gunian 2 days ago

sometimes it feels weird reading anything non fiction because we know so little about reality

thrance 2 days ago

The Big Crunch has nothing to do with Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy. No theories actually predict that it will consume all stars in our galaxy.

Keysh 2 days ago

> is there some sort of gravitational body in the middle that makes everything orbit in galaxies?

No. The Sun's orbit is determined by the total mass of stars, gas, and dark matter interior to the orbit. This is mostly due to the stars (we're not far enough out from the center for dark matter to be the dominant component) and is on the order of several tens of billions of solar masses.

(There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, but its mass is only about 4 million solar masses, so it's negligibly small compared to the mass of all the stars.)

SideburnsOfDoom 2 days ago

The same way that the Earth can orbit the centre of mass of the solar system and also be within the solar system. We say that the Earth orbits the Sun because that's where 99.86% of the mass of the solar system is located.

The Sun in turn orbits the the centre of mass of the Milky Way. But I don't think that the mass of the Milky way's central supermassive black hole dominates in the same way.

ziofill 3 days ago

Orbit around the center. It’s like saying the Earth orbits around the solar system.

dylan604 2 days ago

But the earth doesn't orbit around the solar system. it orbits around the sun as part of the solar system. the solar system as a unit orbits around the center of the galaxy. if you've ever seen the concept images of the Oort cloud, you could visualize that snowball looking roundish object as a visual for the solar system traveling through the galaxy.

lysace 3 days ago

Gaia has a 1.0 × 0.5 m focal plane array on which light from both telescopes is projected. This in turn consists of 106 CCDs of 4500 × 1966 pixels each, for a total of 937.8 megapixels.

Neat.

perihelions 3 days ago

The really neat part is the instrument precision. It's terrifyingly good and I have no idea how it (really) works.

- "Gaia measures their positions to an accuracy of 24 microarcseconds, comparable to measuring the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1000 km"

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/C...

yshklarov 3 days ago

To nitpick with the grammar in the quote: It's capable of measuring to the accuracy of 120 μm at 1000 km. So it cannot accurately measure the diameter of a human hair (which ranges from around 20 to 200 μm) at that distance, but only to the accuracy of a human hair.

perihelions 3 days ago

You're right: this precision is hundreds of times below the diffraction limit of even the James Webb telescope. It can't possibly measure the width of an object that finely; rather, only the relative displacement of its centroid position between two points in time. (And it's a seriously confusing physics miracle that that much is possible).

jdhwosnhw 3 days ago

For point source astrometry, there are a few ways to beat the diffraction limit. For instance, some observers will purposely defocus their optics to spread the target photons over a larger number of pixels, which with sufficient SNR lets you gain a better lower bound (from a Cramer Rao perspective) on precision. I think Gaia actually does something similar to this but “blurs” through time, rather than across space, by purposely not perfectly tracking stars so that they drift at sub-pixel rates across the FPA.

UltraSane 3 days ago

Yes, Gaia slowly spins to that the stars move across its CCD array.

IndrekR 3 days ago

It takes about 14 pictures of each star during orbit (which is quite close to Earth’s orbit around the Sun), so approximately once per month, and then compares those to calculate the star’s distance from the parallax.

colechristensen 3 days ago

Isn't that just the distance between pixels and the image projected onto them?

echoangle 3 days ago

Probably not. The accuracy with which you know the pointing of the telescope probably also plays into it (unless the FOV is large enough to have other stars as a reference?), and you can do subpixel positioning of objects to get more accuracy than full pixel steps.

perihelions 3 days ago

No: it's far weirder and I'm not knowledgeable enough to explain it.

IndrekR 3 days ago

And Gaia also has a downlink speed of approx 3Mbps. So it will process as much as possible on board and just send down less than 20 pixels per each star imaged. That is why you can not get a direct image out of it.

marcodiego 3 days ago

IIRC Gaia had a performance degradation because of stray light, probably ice on the border of it's aperture[1].

How has that affected this result?

[1] https://blogs.esa.int/gaia/2014/06/16/preliminary-analysis-o...

sega_sai 3 days ago

It was not ice, but fibers from the sun shield. The ice issue was resolved by heating the satellite. The stray light issue affected spectra measurements, but not the astrometric side of the mission

laacz 10 hours ago

Has anyone created a 3D map, available via web and with ability to fly through, jump to stellar objects by name, look around, etc?