Earlier this week, the European Space Agency unveiled a new, highly detailed sky map of the Milky Way Galaxy that showcases the brightness and positions of nearly 1.7 billion stars.
It’s the most comprehensive catalogue of stars to date, and it includes precise details about many of the stars’ distances, movements, and colours as well.
With the map’s release, astronomers are hoping to use this information to learn more about the structure of our galactic home and how it first formed billions of years ago.
The map came together with data from ESA’s Gaia spacecraft.
Launched in 2013, the spacecraft sits nearly 1 million miles from Earth, and it’s continuously scanning the sky with two telescopes.
To get a thorough view of the galaxy’s stars, the vehicle rotates once every six hours, mapping one big circle of the sky.
