The intrepid mapping mission has collected more than three trillion observations that'll change the way we see our neck of the cosmic woods. Reading time 3 minutes The European Space Agency’s Gaia ...

On this artist impression of the Milky Way, based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, the location of the new star-formation map is shown. The star-formation region that is mapped ...

This observatory has probably been the most transformative astronomy project of the 21st century, but there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it. Just last week, for instance, the Hayden ...

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’ve probably heard of space telescopes like Hubble and the James Webb. They’re famous for giving us breathtaking ...

One of the best places to study stars is inside "open clusters," which are groups of stars that formed together from the same material and are bound together through gravity. Subscribe to our ...

When you look up at the night sky, do you wonder about what's out there? Most of the stars we can see with the naked eye reside within our own galaxy. And now we know a lot more about them. The ...

The European Space Agency (ESA) has powered down its Gaia spacecraft after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy. On 27 March 2025, ...

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia space telescope has revealed that our Milky Way galaxy has a giant wave rippling outwards from its centre. The unexpected galactic ripple is illustrated in this ...

ESA's Gaia space telescope has further disentangled the history of our galaxy, discovering two surprising streams of stars that formed and wove together more than 12 billion years ago. The two streams ...

The ESA's Gaia spacecraft has been studying the Milky Way for several years, and now the second major dataset from Gaia has pinpointed the position and brightness of a whopping 1.7 billion stars in ...

Scientists created the most accurate three-dimensional map of star-formation regions in our Milky Way galaxy, based on data from ESA's Gaia space telescope. This map will teach us more about these ...