ESA’s decade-long Milky Way Gaia mapping mission still has tons of data to release over the next few years. Expect surprises.

Recent studies challenge the long-held belief that the Milky Way is a standard model for understanding galaxy formation, ...

Stars orbit the centers of galaxies. But beyond that, things get a little harder to visualize. Do galaxies — and, ...

Gaia was launched on December 19, 2013, and began scanning the stars in July 2014. It mapped over two billion stars, ...

Planets, asteroids and comets orbit more massive stars, and stars collect around supermassive black holes, forming galaxies.

The European Space Agency's Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than 3 trillion observations of about 2 billion stars and other objects over the ...

In the meantime, there remains a chance to glimpse Gaia through a small telescope before its final retirement. Uwe Lammers, ...

The intrepid mapping mission has collected more than three trillion observations that'll change the way we see our neck of ...

Known as Sgr A* – pronounced “Sagittarius A star” – the supermassive black hole is four million times the mass of the sun and is known to exhibit flares that can be observed in multiple wavelengths, ...

Goodnight Gaia. The European Space Agency star-tracking satellite ceased operations on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025, after 12 ...

The one in the middle of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A(asterisk ... Scientists know stars can form near and even orbit these black hole behemoths, but they've never seen a pair of stars ...

Soon, the Gaia spacecraft will leave orbit and begin its retirement in the depths of space. In the last 10 years, it has ...