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Mapping the Milky Way

January 20, 2014

Although the Milky Way is the earth’s home galaxy its structure is still largely unknown. The European spacecraft Gaia is designed to provide missing information.

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Bild der Milchstraße
Image: AP

It will be measuring the positions and tracking the movements of a billion stars as the basis for a 3-dimensional map of the Milky Way. Tomorrow Today visits a team of researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Astrophysics Potsdam who are involved in analyzing the Gaia data. The goal of the project is to better understand the development of the Milky Way and to reveal its greatest mystery - the distribution of dark matter.

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Bild der Milchstraße

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Although the Milky Way is the earth’s home galaxy its structure is still largely unknown. The European spacecraft Gaia is designed to provide missing information. It will be measuring the positions and tracking the movements of a billion stars as the basis for a 3-dimensional map of the Milky Way.
ScienceJanuary 20, 201403:56 min