Quakes don’t just happen on Earth, they can also happen on stars. And sometimes those ‘starquakes’ are so violent that a kind of tsunami is created from the material the star is made of. That is one of the discoveries made with the European space telescope Gaia.
Launched in December 2013, Gaia has tracked approximately 1.8 billion stars in the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes Earth. The telescope measures where the stars are, how fast they move in which direction, and what they consist of. Scientists can then calculate how they have developed and which stars belong together. This should yield a three-dimensional map of our immediate vicinity of the universe.
The European Space Agency (ESA) will publish a large overview on Monday with all measurement results to date. The new dataset contains data on the composition, temperatures, colors, masses, ages and speeds of stars. Any scientist who wishes can use the information for his own research and insights. It is the mission’s third and largest data release to date.
100 billion stars
The new Gaia data also includes information on more than 800,000 binary stars, 156,000 asteroids orbiting the sun, 2.9 million other galaxies and 1.9 million quasars.
The Groningen astronomer Amina Helmi is closely involved in the project. “How did the Milky Way come to be, what is its history? What is its family tree, what were its ancestors like? Gaia was built for those questions,” she explains.
The nearly two billion stars that Gaia looks at are only a fraction of the total. There are about 100 billion stars in our Milky Way alone, and there are many billions of such galaxies in the universe. But they are too far away to be seen properly.