Search Results for: gaia

The 3rd data release from the Gaia mission will provide astronomers with a “treasure trove” of information they didn’t have before. As they analyze Gaia’s data in the years ahead, we’re sure to learn new and surprising things about our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Scientists used the measured velocities of 44 globular star clusters to measure the mass of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Gaia satellite data revealed the galaxy, which has avoided detection until now, thanks to its extremely low density and hiding place behind the shroud of the Milky Way’s disk.

Only a small number of hypervelocity stars have ever been discovered. Now ESA’s Gaia mission has revealed 20 more.

Dyson spheres are hypothetical megastructures built by extraterrestrials for the purpose of harvesting all of a star’s energy. Here’s how the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission might help find one.

Data from ESA’s Gaia star-mapping satellite have revealed tantalizing evidence that the famous V-shaped Hyades – nearest star cluster to our sun – is being disrupted. The culprit may be a suspected population of dark matter sub-halos. Wow!

For the first time, astronomers have detected the vaporized remains of the crusts of long-dead Earth-like and Mars-like planets in the atmospheres of white dwarf stars.

A new atlas of nearby binary stars plots more than a million pairs and reveals a profusion of identical twins.

A close look at the “stellar stream” known as Theia 456 finds it contains contains 468 stars born at the same time.

Astronomers have obtained one of the best images yet of a brown dwarf, an object in a mass range midway between stars and planets. This brown dwarf – called HD 33632 Ab – lies 86 light-years from our sun.

Where did the famous mystery Wow! signal, detected in 1977, come from? Astronomer Alberto Caballero might have pinpointed the host star. It’s a sunlike star 1,800 light-years away, in the direction of the center of our Milky Way.

The formation of the sun, the solar system and the subsequent emergence of life on Earth may be a consequence of a collision between our galaxy – the Milky Way – and a smaller galaxy called Sagittarius.

Scientists used computer simulations to learn that our Milky Way galaxy may sometimes launch newly forming stars into the space around itself – that is, into the halo of our galaxy – via outflows triggered by supernova explosions.

We live in a seemingly nondescript neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy, in a small spiral arm called the Orion Arm.

Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, may have a second planet, according to researchers from the National Institute of Astrophysics. If confirmed, it would be an ideal candidate for direct imaging by new upcoming space telescopes.

The Gaia-Enceladus dwarf galaxy slammed into our Milky Way 11.5 billion years ago. It added the mass of 50 billion suns to the Milky Way. Grand names and big numbers! Now new knowledge of this collision comes from a single bright star visible in Southern Hemisphere skies.

A newly found young star cluster on the outskirts of our Milky Way seems to be made of material from the Magellanic Clouds. It appears the collision between the Clouds and our Milky Way may already be starting.

It sounds unbelievable, but a new study from Kagoshima University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan says that exoplanets – thousands of them – could be orbiting supermassive black holes.

According to a new study by astronomers based on data from the Kepler Space Telescope, 1 in 4 sunlike stars should have a planet that’s approximately Earth-sized, orbiting in the star’s habitable zone.

Analysis of data from the Gaia satellite shows a powerful burst of star formation – a stellar baby boom – in our Milky Way galaxy 2 to 3 billion years ago. This single burst might have created half the stars in the galaxy’s flat disk.

University of Michigan astronomers say a hyper-runaway star didn’t originate from the galaxy’s center, as previously believed. Instead, they say, a cluster of young stars booted it from the galaxy’s disk.

“This white dwarf is so old that whatever process is feeding material into its rings must operate on billion-year timescales,” said one of the scientists involved in the discovery.

Researchers used Gaia data to find a stellar stream of at least 4,000 stars that have been moving together in space since they formed, about a billion years ago.

The Andromeda galaxy is the nearest large spiral to our Milky Way. Astronomers have suspected for some time it will eventually collide with our Milky Way. Now – thanks to the Gaia satellite – they know more.

We think of globular clusters as being scattered far from the galaxy’s central regions, in the great spherical halo of our Milky Way. But astronomers are finding them much closer to the galactic center.

Last week, citizen scientists with Zooniverse’s Exoplanet Exoplorers announced K2-288Bb – a type of exoplanet considered rare so far. The finding might shed new light on how planets form.

Astronomers now have the 1st direct evidence that white dwarf stars form crystal cores. Our sun is destined to become a crystal white dwarf in about 10 billion years.