The Gaia satellite has been mapping the sky since 2014. A previous update collected and mapped data from 1.8 billion stars. This already provided a good picture of the Milky Way and its surroundings.
With the new update, one of the gaps on the map has now also been -partly- filled, namely Omega Centauri, the largest globular star cluster visible from Earth. This globular cluster contains about 10 million stars that are very densely packed in the sky, making it difficult for Gaia to tell them apart until now. Thanks to new techniques, this has now been achieved for exactly 526,587 of them.
Gaia has also captured the orbits of 150,000 asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter much more accurately compared to the previous update in 2022. New information has also been released about the Milky Way’s disk.