The Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars is a census of all stars within 100 parsecs (320 light years) of the Sun, what we consider our neighbourhood. The video shows a fly through of this region highlighting the positions, motions and colours of the more than 300 thousand catalogued stars in this region, all measured by the Gaia mission.
In particular is shown how varied the Solar stellar neighbourhood is and how motions can isolate binary stars and even larger clusters of stars. Our solar neighbourhood is extremely varied, and, the virtual travel from our Sun past the planets and out to the edge of this sphere gives an idea of the vastness of even this sample. The final slide put this vastness into perspective showing the solar neighbourhood in comparison to our Galaxy.
Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Released under CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Acknowledgements: Made by Stefan Jordan and Toni Sagristà with Gaia Sky (http://www.zah.uni-heidelberg.de/gaia/outreach/gaiasky)
Based on the paper by Gaia Collaboration, Smart, et al. "Gaia Early Data Release 3: The Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars", Astronomy and Astrophysics, in press
Page last updated: 03 December 2020