A local cosmic celebrity was recently pictured among the multitude of stars and Solar System bodies surveyed by ESA’s Gaia satellite: Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, currently accompanied by another ESA spacecraft, Rosetta.
Last Friday, 21 August, ESA’s billion-star surveyor, Gaia, completed its first year of science observations in its main survey mode.
The Gaia satellite has discovered a unique binary system where one star is 'eating' the other, but neither star has any hydrogen, the most common element in the Universe.
Gaia team released stellar density map, showing the outline of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and of its neighbouring Magellanic Clouds.
Today (19 December 2014) is the first anniversary of Gaia's launch. To mark this occassion ESA asked six members of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) to share their memories of the launch and the commissioning.
We are pleased to report that one of our colleagues, Dr George Seabroke, won this year’s MSSL Elizabeth Puchnarewicz Award for Outstanding Contribution to Public Outreach.
A group of astronomers working at the Liverpool John Moores University used the SPRAT spectrograph installed on the Liverpool Telescope to confirm that one of the Gaia alerts (listed on Gaia Photometric Science Alerts: Validation Phase page), Gaia14aat, is a dwarf nova.
Page last updated: 01 July 2014
