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Sep 26, 2016
Gaia: Here Comes the Sun
Image Credit & Copyright: Astronomy Picture of the Day -- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Courtesy of http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Gaia: Here Comes the Sun
Image Credit & Copyright: Astronomy Picture of the Day -- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Courtesy of http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
What would it look like to return home from outside our galaxy?
Although designed to answer
greater questions,
recent data from ESA's robotic
Gaia mission is helping to provide a uniquely
modern perspective on humanity's place in the universe.
Gaia
orbits the
Sun near the Earth and resolves
star's positions so precisely that it can determine a
slight shift from its changing vantage point over the course of a year, a shift that is proportionately smaller for more
distant stars -- and so
determines distance.
In the first sequence of
the video,
an illustration of the
Milky Way is shown that soon
resolves into a three-dimensional
visualization of Gaia star data.
A few notable stars are labelled with their
common names, while others stars are labelled with numbers from
Gaia's catalog.
Eventually the
viewer arrives at our home star
Sol
(the Sun),
then resolving the reflective glow of its third planet:
Earth.
The
featured video
is based on just over 600,000 stars, but
Gaia
is on track to measure the
parallax
distances to
over one billion stars over its
planned five year mission.