ESA's Gaia satellite mapped a billion stars in the Milky Way

The European Space Agency launched the Gaia satellite and its one-billion-pixel camera to space back in 2013. Gaia has been mapping the Milky Way ever since, and now the ESA has released a 3D map featuring over a billion stars -- we've never seen 400 million of those before -- based on the data it collected from July 2014 to September 2015. As you can see above, it shows how dense a billion stars look. Don't dwell on those weird lines cocooning the structure too much: they're merely artefacts from the way the satellite scans the galaxy. Team member Timo Prusti said this demonstrates that "it is possible to handle the analysis of a billion stars." More

(Source: Engadget - Sep 16)