The European Space Agency (ESA) on Thursday launched an advanced telescope designed to detect a billion stars and provide the most detailed map yet of the Milky Way and our place in it.
The Gaia telescope was successfully hoisted by a Soyuz-STB-Fregat rocket from the ESA’s space base in Kourou, French Guiana, the agency reported in a Webcast.
The star hunter separated from the last of the rocket’s four stages 42 minutes after launch, and mission controllers said everything was fine.
The 740 million euro (US$1.02 billion) device, the most sophisticated space telescope ever built by Europe, aims at building an “astronomical census” of a billion stars, or around 1 percent of all the stars in the Milky Way.
By repeating the observations as many as 70 times throughout its mission, Gaia can help astronomers calculate the distance, speed, direction and motion of these stars and build a 3D map of our section of the galaxy.
The stellar haul will be 50 times greater than the bounty provided by Hipparcos, a telescope of the early 1990s, whose work provided a gold standard reference guide still widely used by professional astronomers today.
“Gaia is the culmination of nine years of intensive work, which will enable exceptional advances in our understanding of the universe, its history and laws,” said Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of France’s National Center of Space Studies (CNES), which is taking a lead role in the mission.
“We are at the dawn of revolutionising our understanding of the history of the Milky Way,” said Stephane Israel, chairman and CEO of Arianespace, which launched the satellite.
Gaia will also help in the search for planets beyond our solar system — as many as 50,000 so-called “extrasolar” planets could be spotted during the satellite’s five-year life, astronomers said.
Gaia will also observe the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to help the search for any rocks that may one day threaten Earth, and keep a watch for distant exploding stars, called supernovae, which are rarely observed in real time.
The 2.03 tonne telescope “is so sensitive that it can measure the equivalent of the diameter of a hair at a distance of 1,000km,” CNES says on its Web site.
“If Hipparcos could measure the angle that corresponds to the height of an astronaut on the moon, Gaia will be able to measure his thumbnail,” ESA said.
Gaia will start its star survey in May after taking up position at the so-called Lagrange point “L2,” 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, which offers year-round observation of the cosmos without the view being disturbed by the sun, Earth or moon.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not