{"id":24782,"date":"2025-03-27T03:01:24","date_gmt":"2025-03-27T04:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=24782"},"modified":"2025-03-27T04:27:17","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T04:27:17","slug":"gaia-to-shut-down-after-more-than-a-decade-of-mapping-the-milky-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=24782","title":{"rendered":"Gaia to Shut Down After More Than a Decade of Mapping the Milky Way"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From ancient star streams to the innards of white dwarfs, the Gaia space telescope has seen it all.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, mission specialists at the European Space Agency will send Gaia, which is low on fuel, into orbit around the sun, and switch it off after more than a decade of service to the world\u2019s astronomers.<\/p>\n

Gaia has charted the cosmos since 2014, creating a vast encyclopedia of the positions and movements of celestial objects in our Milky Way<\/a> and beyond. It is difficult to capture the breadth of development and discovery that the spinning observatory has enabled. But here are a few numbers: nearly two billion stars, millions of potential galaxies and some 150,000 asteroids. These observations have led to more than 13,000 studies<\/a>, so far, by astronomers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Gaia\u2019s all-sky view of our Milky Way galaxy and neighboring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars in the mission\u2019s first two years of taking data.<\/span>ESA\/Gaia\/DPAC<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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An artist\u2019s impression of the Milky Way as viewed from above, based on data from the Gaia space telescope.<\/span>ESA\/Gaia\/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Gaia has transformed the way scientists understand the universe, and its data has become a reference point for many other telescopes on the ground and in space. And less than a third of the data it has gathered has so far been released to scientists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s something that is now underpinning almost all of astronomy,\u201d said Anthony Brown, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands who leads Gaia\u2019s data processing and analysis group. \u201cI think if you were to ask my astronomy colleagues, they couldn\u2019t imagine anymore having to do research without Gaia being there.\u201d<\/p>\n

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From ancient star streams to the innards of white dwarfs, the Gaia space telescope has seen it all.On Thursday, mission specialists at the European Space Agency will send Gaia, which is low on fuel, into orbit around the sun, and switch it off after more than a decade of service to the world\u2019s astronomers.Gaia has charted the cosmos since 2014, creating a vast encyclopedia of the positions and movements of celestial objects in our Milky Way and beyond. It is difficult to capture the breadth of development and discovery that the spinning observatory has enabled. But here are a few numbers: nearly two billion stars, millions of potential galaxies and some 150,000 asteroids. These observations have led to more than 13,000 studies, so far, by astronomers.Gaia\u2019s all-sky view of our Milky Way galaxy and neighboring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars in the mission\u2019s first two years of taking data.ESA\/Gaia\/DPACAn artist\u2019s impression of the Milky Way as viewed from above, based on data from the Gaia space telescope.ESA\/Gaia\/DPAC, Stefan Payne-WardenaarGaia has transformed the way scientists understand the universe, and its data has become a reference point for many other telescopes on the ground and in space. And less than a third of the data it has gathered has so far been released to scientists.\u201cIt\u2019s something that is now underpinning almost all of astronomy,\u201d said Anthony Brown, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands who leads Gaia\u2019s data processing and analysis group. \u201cI think if you were to ask my astronomy colleagues, they couldn\u2019t imagine anymore having to do research without Gaia being there.\u201dWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24784,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24782"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24785,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24782\/revisions\/24785"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}