Shaw-IAU Workshops by the OAE

Gaia is a highly advanced and specialised space telescope, developed and operated by the European Space Agency. It was launched in 2013, and was operated for 10 years, until January 2025. It is creating a revolutionary three-dimensional map of our Galaxy by measuring the extremely accurate positions and motions of some three billion stars. While the measurement of star positions has a very long history, stretching back more than 2000 years, accuracies have improved dramatically in the last three decades by exploiting measurements from above the Earth's atmosphere. This is providing a massive advance in mapping the Galaxy, and understanding its composition, structure, and history. Gaia uses the Earth's orbit baseline, of around 300 million kilometres, to measure star distances by triangulation. Measuring the stars repeatedly over several years, and with unprecedented accuracy, also allows us to measure how each star is moving through space. I will use a series of animations to illustrate some of the new insights that Gaia providing about the structure and evolution of stars, and about the structure, dynamics, and origin of our Milky Way Galaxy.