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Image Credit : ESA Gaia Mission / YouTube
The night sky will look very different from what it is now in half a million years, and researchers have discovered what it looks like.
Have you ever witnessed 40,000 meteors glowing across the sky at the same time together?
Have you ever witnessed 40,000 meteors glowing across the sky at the same time together?
If you want to see it, the European Space Agency (ESA) offers you two options: One is to stare at the night sky for half a million years, as our solar system is pushing steadily into the Milky Way, which will require some patience. Or see a new 60-second simulation of the same thing (half a million years) thanks to the European Space Agency's Gaia Space Observatory .
In this new simulation, 40,000 stars, all within 325 light-years from the Earth's sun, travel into space, making a buzz, leaving long trails of light behind. Each point of light represents one real object in the Milky Way galaxy, and each bright path shows the path of this object's expected movement through the galaxy over the next 400,000 years. The fastest and brightest lines are found closer to our solar system, while the slower, more blurry lines are located further away from us.
According to researchers at the European Space Agency, the simulation shows an unsurprising pattern.At the end of the simulation, most of the stars appear to cluster on the right side of the screen, while the left side of the screen remains relatively blank. This is not because a newly formed black hole attracts stars nor a strange gravitational ray that attracts them, but simply that our sun is also constantly moving, making passing stars appear clustered in the other direction.
European Space Agency researchers wrote in a blog post: “If you imagine yourself moving through a crowd (while they are standing still), then the people in front of you appear to be moving away when you approach them, while the people behind you appear to be standing closer to each other as you move away from them. This effect is also caused by the movement of the sun in relation to the rest of the stars. "
The data that made this mosaic of cosmic larvae possible came from the third official release of data for the Gaia satellite ( EDR3 ), which became publicly available on December 3rd. The new data dump contains detailed information for more than 1.8 billion celestial bodies, including the exact locations, velocities, and orbital paths of more than 330,000 stars within 325 light-years from Earth, and according to the European Space Agency news release, the 40,000 stars represented in the simulation were randomly selected. .
The Gaia satellite was launched in 2013 on the Express Mission to measure the positions, distances, and motions of stars, and the second release of data, launched in 2018, helped astronomers compile the most detailed map of the universe ever. The new third release added about 100 million new objects to this hidden treasure, according to European Space Agency researchers.
Sources : space.com
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