What's Up? The Space Place

Hey Space Placers! The following story and video makes for a perfect Milky Way Monday! Learn about the European Space Agency's Gaia Mission that is rewriting the books on our Milky Way Galaxy. Sky Guy in VA

Hey Space Placers! I am sure you are getting your March Madness Brackets set up. Check out the most accurate to date determination of how much our home galaxy "weighs", or more precisely, how much mass does it contain. Center of Milky Way Galaxy Taken Underway on Azamara Quest Pretty amazing story and result. Most of our galaxy's mass is in the form of dark matter - something we can detect by its gravitational influence but cannot see. Sky Guy in VA

Hey Space Placers! The European Space Agency (ESA) released today the most recent data about the Milky Way Galaxy (MWG) and surrounding area of space. This is a HUGE data release of over 1.7 BILLION stars in our galaxy, data on the 12 dwarf galaxies orbiting the MWG and the Andromeda Galaxy. Just look at YOUR home galaxy in color: Here is the description by ESA: Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. The map shows the total brightness and colour of stars observed by the ESA satellite in each portion of the sky between July 2014 and May 2016. Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of especially bright stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer bright stars are observed. The colour representation is obtained by combining the total amount of light with the amount of blue and red light recorded by Gaia in each patch of the sky.  The bright horizontal...

Hey Space Placers! Look at this image  and click on it for a larger view - be sure to go to the link to get full resolution by clicking on the image: Over a BILLION stars mapped in our Milky Way Galaxy Credit: ESA Gaia Mission What you are seeing is over a BILLION stars of our Milky Way Galaxy. As stated by the European Space Agency ,  the Gaia spacecraft over the past 14 months has  "pinned down the precise position on the sky and the brightness of 1142 million stars.  As a taster of the richer catalogue to come in the near future, today’s release also features the distances and the motions across the sky for more than two million stars. ". I have included the annotated image because it contains so many of my sky favorites, especially the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda and Triangulum Galaxies and M-42 in Orion as well. In a word it is "Amazing". It is the most complete mapping project of our Galaxy to date and will only get better a...