The exhibition “One thousand million eyes for one thousand million stars”, organised by UB researchers, describes the Gaia mission
Gaiaʼs farewell
On Thursday 27 June, Astrium (Toulouse, France), the company where the last actions to prepare the satellite are being done, hosted an observation of the satellite before being launched. The event was attended by Eduard Masana, Carme Jordi and Lola Balaguer, UB researchers and members of Institute of Sciences of the Cosmos (ICCUB).
The group of the UB has worked on several aspects of the mission: from the simulations that are necessary to prepare the data processing system, to the algorithms of the process or the definition of some parts of the instruments, such as photometry filters.
Missionʼs objectives
As the exhibition describes, the objective of Gaia mission is to know better the history of the Milky Way, from its origins to present days, by measuring the position, distance and movements of one thousand million stars and studying their physical properties (temperature, luminosity, chemical composition, etc.).
Gaiaʼs observations will be unprecedentedly precise. Gaia will measure one billion stars, roughly 1% of all the stars spread across the Milky Way. Nowadays, the most precise astronomic catalogue includes 120,000 stars and was developed by Hipparcos, an ESAʼs satellite.
The space catalogue
Gaia mission is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as extra-solar planets —it is planned to discovered around 15,000— and failed stars, called brown dwarfs. Within our own Solar System, Gaia will also catalogue hundreds of thousands of asteroids. It will generate more than one petabyte of information, in other words, one million giga, which will have to be processed and analysed in order to get results. Gaia will also enable to obtain different parameters for each object, so a map of our Galaxy will be done in 2020.