Three weeks before Christmas, astronomers are opening one of their presents early. Inside is a most welcome gift—a vast catalogue of more than a billion stars in and around our galaxy, the most ...

A new map of the galaxy, the most precise to date, reveals positions on the sky for over 1 billion stars both within and beyond the Milky Way. This new galactic atlas, courtesy of the European Space ...

It may look like a Jackson Pollock painting, but this colorful mess is actually a new map of the Milky Way, with dots and lines of different colors representing groups of stars that were born together ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. On Jan. 15, 2025, the Gaia spacecraft took its last image. Then the craft ran a final round of engineering tests, fired its ...

Last Thursday, a massive amount of information was released to astronomers from the ESA Gaia space observatory. The data provides an incredibly detailed map of the Milky Way described as the best of ...

On this artist impression of the Milky Way, based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, the location of the new star-formation map is shown. The star-formation region that is mapped ...

1.6 billion stars. 11.4 million galaxies. 158,000 asteroids. One spacecraft. The European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, which launched in 2013, has long surpassed its goal of charting more ...

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the most detailed catalog of our galaxy, using data from the Gaia mission launched in 2013. This three-dimensional map shows the locations of more than 1.8 ...

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’ve probably heard of space telescopes like Hubble and the James Webb. They’re famous for giving us breathtaking ...