GAIA Reveals Bar at Center of Milky Way for First Time Ever
The Milky Way galaxy, our home among the Cosmos, is a barred spiral galaxy, containing hundreds of billions of stars. Our massive family of stellar systems fits within a disk roughly 100,000 light years across, but just 1,000 light years thick.
The Gaia space telescope, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission launched December 19, 2013, was designed with a unique mission — to create a 3D map of stars in the Milky Way and beyond. Astronomers have now used this remarkable instrument to reveal the bar at the center of our galaxy for the first time. This is likely to be just one of the first answers to some of the most fundamental questions about the formation and evolution of our galaxy.
“Galactic astrophysics is currently in a similar phase as geography was in the 15th century: large parts of the Earth were unknown to contemporary scientists, only crude maps of most of the known parts of the Earth existed, and even the orbit of our planet was still under debate. Nowadays, major parts of the Milky Way are still hidden by thick layers of dust, but we are beginning to discover and to map our Galaxy in a much more accurate fashion by virtue of dedicated large photometric, astrometric, and spectroscopic surveys,” researchers wrote in a journal article, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
