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• Autores: Stuart Clark
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2947, 2013, págs. 38-41
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • It will be the biggest selfie of all time. When the Gaia space telescope launches, it is set to map a billion stars in the galaxy with unprecedented accuracy--and fundamentally transform the understanding of the cosmos. If all goes according to plan, the European Space Agency's bold mission will blast off from French Guiana on a Russian Soyuz rocket and travel 1.5 million km into space. Far beyond the glow of Earth's atmosphere Gaia will hover in orbit around the sun and start to spin slowly, capturing every celestial object that falls within its gaze for the next five years. As well as charting 1% of the stars in the Milky Way--around one billion of them--the telescope will locate planets around other suns, warn people of asteroids in the solar system and pinpoint hundreds of thousands of new and distant galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Here, Clark reports this most stunningly detailed map yet if Earth's cosmic neighborhood.