With the help of space Observatory Gaia will create the largest star catalog

Launched by the European space Agency in December of last year the space telescope Gaia successfully arrived to the place of their work in the so-called Lagrangian point, remote from the Earth by 1.5 million kilometers. Technical Arsenal Gaia is a complex of 2 side telescopes and photographic sensor with a unique high-resolution. For comparison here is an example: Gaia can determine the exact size of a human hair at a distance of 500 km.



In the five years of its continuous work space telescope must examine an average of 70 times each portion of the sky. Compared to its predecessor Hipparcos, Gaia telescope will be able to take a picture 500 times more stars. This performance was possible due to the higher sensitivity of the instrument, which detects objects with intensity a thousand times smaller than could fix Hipparcos.

The result of five years of the Gaia telescope will be a catalog with the coordinates and speeds of more than a billion stars in our galaxy has a volume of 100 TB. The accuracy of the measurement will be 24 microseconds of arc.

Source: techcult.ru