Gaia space telescope charts billion-star map in 3D

PARIS, Sept. 14 (UPI) -- A new map, populated with data collected by the Gaia space telescope, features the position and brightness of more than a billion stars. It's the most comprehensive map of the universe yet conceived.

The newly published map also features the trajectory and distance of two million stars. More stellar specifics will be added to the map over time, but scientists at the European Space Agency say they're already overwhelmed by the massive amount of data.

The space telescope was launched in 2013 and began collecting data in 2014.

"The beautiful map we are publishing today shows the density of stars measured by Gaia across the entire sky, and confirms that it collected superb data during its first year of operations," Timo Prusti, Gaia project scientist at ESA, said in a news release.

The latest map is a significant improvement on the last effort to plot the cosmos, the Hipparcos Catalogue. Gaia's map is twice as precise and features 20 times as many stars.

The vast majority of the universe's stars exist within massive clusters. It's Gaia's ability to dissect and analyze the contents of these clusters that makes the telescope so powerful.

"With Gaia's first data, it is now possible to measure the distances and motions of stars in about 400 clusters up to 4,800 light-years away," said Antonella Vallenari, an astronomer at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica.

Gaia will continue surveying the skies through 2018, measuring stellar temperatures and chemical composition -- data necessary to age and classify stars.

To collect such data, Gaia will have to survey the same stars more than once, allowing the telescope to further analyze a star's movement within its galaxy and relative to the Milky Way.

After five years of observations, researchers will be able to create a time-lapse movie of cosmic evolution, a model that could help astronomers predict the future of the universe.

"Gaia's present and future data will revolutionize all areas of astronomy, allowing us to investigate our place in the universe, from our local neighborhood, the solar system, to galactic and even grander, cosmological scales," concluded Anthony Brown, an astronomer at Leiden University and chair of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium.