The latest “treasure trove” of data released by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission contains new and improved data for nearly 2bn stars in the Milky Way.

The third data release (Gaia DR3) contains data that is likely to offer new insights into our galaxy and beyond, such as the chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colours, masses and ages of stars.

The data has revealed the largest chemical map of the galaxy to date, from our solar system to smaller galaxies that surround ours.

When stars die, they release metals into the gas and dust between stars called the interstellar medium, where new stars are born. Because of this, a star’s chemical composition can be seen as its DNA, which can provide information about its origin.

The ESA hopes that astronomers can use the latest Gaia data to reconstruct the Milky Way’s structure and past evolution, to better understand the lifecycle of stars.

“Gaia’s chemical catalogue of 6m stars is ten times larger than previous ground-based catalogues, so this is really revolutionary,” said Dr George Seabroke of UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory. “Gaia’s data releases are telling us where stars were located and how they are moving. Now we also know what a lot of these stars are made of.”

The data was collected between July 2014 and May 2017, containing new insights into stars such as “starquakes”, stellar DNA and asymmetric motions.

The latest data set also contains the largest catalogue to date of binary stars, thousands of solar system objects such as asteroids, and millions of galaxies and quasars outside the Milky Way.

“Unlike other missions that target specific objects, Gaia is a survey mission,” said Timo Prusti, ESA project scientist for Gaia. “This means that while surveying the entire sky with billions of stars multiple times, Gaia is bound to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss.”

The latest data set is massive, surpassing the previous Gaia map released in 2018, which pinned down the positions of nearly 1.7bn stars with great precision.

By comparison, the first data release following Gaia’s launch at the end of 2013 captured data for just 2m stars.

Starquakes

In the previous surveys, Gaia found radial oscillations that cause stars to swell and shrink periodically, while keeping their spherical shape.

But in the new dataset, Gaia also spotted other vibrations that are described as “large-scale tsunamis”. These non-radial oscillations change the global shape of a star and are harder to detect.

These tiny motions on the surface of stars – or starquakes – have been detected in thousands of stars. Some of these stars should not contain starquakes, based on our current theories.

“Starquakes teach us a lot about stars, notably their internal workings,” Conny Aerts of KU Leuven said. “Gaia is opening a goldmine for ‘asteroseismology’ of massive stars.”

While gathering data from the deepest depths of space, the latest batch of data also provides a greater level of insight into our own solar system.

Based on a new asteroid survey from the Gaia data, we have detected almost 155,000 asteroids and their orbits, to help potentially prevent a future collision on Earth. The 2018 data from Gaia helped us detect the position of around 14,000 asteroids.

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