2023-10-17 04:00:12
The Gaia mission continues to revolutionize our understanding of the Universe. Its latest dataset, known as Focused Product Release (FPR), significantly enriches the most comprehensive stellar catalog ever compiled.
Illustration of the Gaia space observatory during its observations.
Credit: ESA
The FPR contains more than half a million new faint stars, more than 380 gravitationally lensed quasars, and the positions of more than 150,000 Solar System asteroids. These data (In information technology (IT), a piece of data is an elementary description, often…), added to the 1.8 billion (One billion (1,000,000,000) is the natural number that follows nine hundred…) of stars already listed, will allow us to refine our map of the Milky Way (The Milky Way (also called “our galaxy”, or sometimes…) and its environment (The environment is all that which surrounds us. It is the set of natural and…) cosmic elements.
The new dataset complements Gaia’s third Data Release (DR3) published in June 2022. Katja Weingrill, lead author of the research and member of the Gaia collaboration, indicates that beyond cartography, this update (An update, often abbreviated as MAJ or MàJ , is the action which consists of…) allows us to better model globular clusters like Omega Centauri.
Omega Centauri, the largest globular cluster visible from Earth.
Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
The latter, located about 15,800 light years from Earth, contains about 10 million stars, making its core the most densely populated region observed so far by the space telescope.
In addition to improving stellar mapping, Gaia is also useful in the hunt for gravitational lenses, these massive objects that amplify light from sources distant.
Candidates for gravitationally lensed quasars.
Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Christine Ducourant, co-author of the research and member of the Gaia collaboration, points out that Gaia has identified 381 strong candidates for gravitationally lensed quasars, including 50 considered very likely.
Next steps include collaborations with other missions, such as the Euclid space telescope, launched in July 2023, to study mysterious aspects of the Universe such as dark matter (In astrophysics, dark matter (or dark matter), translation from English…) and dark energy (In cosmology, dark energy is a form of hypothetical energy filling the entire Universe…).
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