TO THE STARS... AND BEYOND!

Europe has launched the Gaia satellite - one of the most ambitious space missions in history.

Gaia aims to map the precise positions and distances to more than a billion stars. The satellite's remarkable sensitivity will reveal a colossal number of previously unseen objects, including new planets beyond our solar system, asteroids, comets, cold dead stars and even tepid stars that never quite fired into life. Gaia is currently travelling to an observing station situated some 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, the journey taking over a month to complete. The satellite will compile profiles on each star that it will encounter, working out how far from Earth they are and will even study their motion across the sky! Other properties such as temperature, brightness and composition can be recorded, making it possible to then calculate the ages of the stars and for about 150 million of these stars, Gaia will calculate their velocity either towards or away from Earth. This will then enable scientists to use these stars as three-dimensional markers to trace the evolution of The Milky Way. Scientists may then be able to predict what the Milky Way may look like in the future and also how it was assembled in the past.

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