Milky Way Future After 5 Million Years Revealed By Video

You can see the Milky Way's future in a video clip being shown as part of the European Space Agency's Gaia mission's early information release. There is also the movement of almost 2 million stars in the next 5 million years in the video from the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution sample.

As Phys.org cited, Gaia is a space observatory that was situated at the L2 Lagrange Point. This is a steady place in space one million miles behind Earth as seen from the sun. The main goal of this station is astrometry. This is a technique to assess the exact positions, separations, and movement of 1 billion cosmic articles so that a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way's future galaxy can be made.

Astronomers benefit from the radial velocity measurements from the Gaia mission on the Milky Way's future. Experts get a stereoscopic image of about 1 percent of the galaxy's stars. Right now, the stars are constantly moving about the Milky Way and the galactic center. While the sun and stars also circle and orbit the center at half-million miles per hour, they are all located so far that their movement has not even touched the needle through the time span of development, according to Science Times.

You can see 2,057,050 stars from the TGAS sample in the video, with 24,320 bright stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue that were not part of the first data release from Gaia in September 2016, according to European Space Agency. Opening with the positions of stars in the Milky Way assessed by Gaia in 2014 and 2015, the video shows how they help to advance later on. The frames in the video are isolated by 750 years. The timeline of the Milky Way's future general succession in the video covers 5 million years.

Watch a preview of the stars moving. They will be out with the data releases of the Gaia mission. Experts can get more information on the Milky Way's future as well as the galaxy. You can also understand further about the formation history of the galaxy through the video.

YouTube/European Space Agency

Join the Discussion

Recommended Stories

Real Time Analytics