(ORDO NEWS) — When we look at the night sky from day to day, it seems to us that nothing is changing. ESA scientists working with the Gaia space telescope decided to show clearly that this is actually not the case. They created a video showing the movement of 40,000 stars over 400,000 years.
ESA has created a real travel map of the stars along the Milky Way, a must-see!
With an ultra-accurate map of the Milky Way in their hands, ESA scientists were able to look into the future and find out how this map will change over time. For clarity, astronomers have created a slow motion video that shows the travel of 40,000 stars 400,000 years long.
The stars shown in the video are located within 325 light years of the Sun. Each point on the map represents one real object in our galaxy, and each line represents the object’s estimated movement over the next 400,000 years.
While the ESA video is truly impressive in its scope, scientists note that this is only a small fraction of the objects that the Gaia telescope is tracking. It covers the position and trajectory of 1.8 billion objects in space, including 330,000 stars. The authors of the project note that they could create a video that would show the trajectories of stars 1.6 million years ahead. But such a number of stars and the length of the time span would turn the Milky Way into a giant white oval, so scientists decided to limit the scope of the project.
In the cutscene, you can see the stars clustering together at the edges of the map. This has to do with how the sun moves. “If you imagine yourself walking through a crowd of people who are standing still, then the crowd in front of you will seem to part as you approach them, while behind you people will seem to be closer to each other,” says the ESA blog …
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