The ESA telescope has made a unique discovery in our galaxy

The Gaia telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA) presented the results of a new study of the Milky Way and the Solar System. He discovered 500 thousand new stars in our galaxy and 156 thousand unknown asteroids in the solar system. Gizmodo writes about it.

Gaia orbits the Sun in approximately the same area as the famous Webb Space Telescope – at a distance of 1.5 million km from Earth. He began his work in December 2013 to create a complete map of our galaxy and identify as many new stars and other objects in the galaxy as possible.

This time, Gaia observed the largest globular star cluster in our galaxy – Omega Centauri, located 17 thousand light years from Earth and 150 light years across.

Here the telescope discovered 500,000 new stars that are dimmer than previously discovered. At the same time, the space telescope exceeded their expectations, as it was able to detect 10 times more stars in the core of the star cluster. Thanks to the new observations, we were able to study how the stars are distributed here, and much more. We also obtained data on 156 thousand previously unknown asteroids in the Solar System and were able to describe their orbits and approximate properties. The Gaia telescope also discovered 381 so-called gravitational lenses. These are objects in space that distort and magnify light from objects in deeper space. With the help of such gravitational lenses, astronomers can peer into the farthest corners of the Universe,” ESA said.

So, scientists discovered that some objects are not stars, but distant quasars. These are very bright galactic nuclei powered by black holes.

Let’s recall that Hubble previously photographed the spiral galaxy IC 1776, located at a distance of more than 150 million light years from Earth.