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20 August 2024While studying stars located nearby and within 100 pc of the Sun, researchers found an interesting duo which belongs in the Milky Way halo: a combination of a white dwarf and an L subdwarf, forming a wide binary system. The first of its kind ever found that belongs to the halo. And it’s been there for a while, the system is thought to be about...
25 July 2024Today Gaia celebrates 10 years of science operations. We show some impressive numbers on the current status of the Gaia mission. Since the start of Gaia's science operations phase on 25 July 2014, Gaia has scanned across more than 256 billion objects. The typical star flow in the focal plane is about 3400 stars per second. It is good to realize...
23 July 2024A study led by Beck et al. (2024), recently published in A&A, exploited the Gaia DR3 binary catalogue (Gaia Collaboration, Arenou et al. 2023) and the NASA Kepler and TESS catalogues of 35,000 solar-like oscillators (Yu et al. 2018, Mackereth et al. 2021, Mathur et al. 2022) to identify stars in these systems that represent the present and the...
25 June 2024Have you ever wondered why some stars appear bluer while others are redder? Or why some stars shine brightly while others remain faint? These seemingly straightforward yet fundamental questions have intrigued humanity for centuries. Approximately a hundred years ago, astronomers Herzsprung and Russell unveiled a profound discovery, establishing...
26 April 2024Gaia captures a solar eruption fully detailed, as if it were a textbook example!
Onboard Gaia, the computers that process the images automatically identify and count the tracks left by the passage of charged particles through the detectors. These computers send a constant stream of charged particle counters to the operators on the ground where...
22 April 2024The European Gaia space mission is primarily designed to map with extreme precision the positions, parallaxes, and proper motions of over a billion stars in the Milky Way and beyond, creating an exceptionally detailed three-dimensional stellar catalogue. Its characteristics have also proven optimal for contributing to one of the most promising...
16 April 2024Gaia spots Milky Way's most massive black hole of stellar origin! It's 33 solar masses, dormant, the 2nd closest to Earth at ~2000 light years away, part of a wide binary with an old giant star, with an estimated age of 11 Gyr. Find full details in our story!
2 April 2024While updating the Gaia low extinction Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams (HRD) to the Gaia DR3 data and EDR3 based extinction map of Lallement et al. 2022, we noticed a strange hook of stars at the absolute Gaia magnitude MG~4, going from the main-sequence toward the hot sub-dwarf clump up to the colour GBP-GRP~0 and than moving down parallel to the...
