ESO: Pinpointing Gaia to Map the Milky Way

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ESO: Pinpointing Gaia to Map the Milky Way

Post by bystander » Thu May 02, 2019 4:10 pm

Pinpointing Gaia to Map the Milky Way
ESO Organisation Release | VST | 2019 May 02

ESO’s VST helps determine the spacecraft’s orbit to enable the most accurate map ever of more than a billion stars

Click to view full size image 1 or image 2
Credit: ESO/VLT Survey Telescope (VST)
This image, a composite of several observations captured by ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST), shows the ESA spacecraft Gaia as a faint trail of dots across the lower half of the star-filled field of view. These observations were taken as part of an ongoing collaborative effort to measure Gaia’s orbit and improve the accuracy of its unprecedented star map.

Gaia, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), surveys the sky from orbit to create the largest, most precise, three-dimensional map of our Galaxy. One year ago, the Gaia mission produced its much-awaited second data release, which included high-precision measurements — positions, distance and proper motions — of more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. This catalogue has enabled transformational studies in many fields of astronomy, addressing the structure, origin and evolution the Milky Way and generating more than 1700 scientific publications since its launch in 2013.

In order to reach the accuracy necessary for Gaia’s sky maps, it is crucial to pinpoint the position of the spacecraft from Earth. Therefore, while Gaia scans the sky, gathering data for its stellar census, astronomers regularly monitor its position using a global network of optical telescopes, including the VST at ESO’s Paranal Observatory [1]. The VST is currently the largest survey telescope observing the sky in visible light, and records Gaia’s position in the sky every second night throughout the year. ...

Observing Gaia from Earth to improve its star maps
ESA | Space Science | Science & Technology | Gaia | 2019 May 02
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