Gaia's Milky Way map

These visuals are new artist impressions of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from the Gaia space telescope, and created in January 2025. The visuals are shared here for the community for easy use when showcasing results related to the Milky Way. Rules for reuse can be found from the license.

Gaia has changed our impression of the Milky Way. Even seemingly simple ideas about the nature of our galaxy’s central bar and its spiral arms have been overturned. Gaia has shown us that our galaxy has more than two spiral arms and that these arms are less prominent than we previously thought. In addition, from Gaia data was derived that the central bar is more inclined with respect to the Sun.

From our location within our Milky Way we can't take a picture of the Milky Way as a whole. Gaia maps our galaxy from within, by gathering information star by star of almost 2 billion stars of our Milky Way. These data were used to create an update to the Milky Way model, from which the visuals were rendered. Thanks to Gaia we have the best insight yet of what our home galaxy looks like. We can expect an even sharper view of the Milky Way, once all of Gaia’s observations collected over the past decade are made available in two upcoming data releases.

The visuals shared below were created in January 2025 and contain the most up to date view of our Milky Way so far, thanks to Gaia.

Video animation of our Milky Way

Video animation of our Milky Way. Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar - CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Video animation of our Milky Way - with voiceover. Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar - CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO