Astronomers are using new data from the Gaia Observatory to map the motions and chemical signatures of nearly 2 billion stars – giants and dwarfs, old and young – including some that vibrate violently during events known as “earthquakes.” The multidimensional cosmic research was released on Monday by the European Space Agency (ESA). Astronomers compared its effect in their field with genomic analysis in biology. “Our galaxy is a beautiful crucible with stars,” said Alejandra Recio-Blanco of the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and a member of the Gaia Collaboration. “This diversity is extremely important because it tells us the story of the formation of our galaxy. . . It also clearly shows that we all belong to an ever-changing system, which was formed thanks to the assembly of stars and gases of different origins “. Gaia is on a special 1.5 million km orbit from Earth called Lagrange L2, near the new James Webb telescope launched into space late last year. The sample of 1.8 billion Gaia stars is about one percent of the total stellar population of our Galaxy. “Gaia is a research mission,” said Timo Prusti, a project scientist at ESA, unlike many other observatories, such as the Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes. He said this approach meant that “Gaia is sure to make discoveries that other more dedicated missions would miss”. “We can not wait for the astronomy community to dive into our new data to learn even more about our galaxy and its environment,” Prusti said. Data release adds new information about the chemical composition, temperature, mass and velocity of stars moving in or out of the solar system. Many stars such as the sun contain heavy metals recycled from previous generations of stars that were born and died during the 13.6 billion year history of our Galaxy, although some contain only the elementary light elements hydrogen and helium.

An unexpected discovery from the new data is Gaia’s ability to detect stellar earthquakes – strong oscillations, such as stellar tsunamis, which are detected in thousands of stars. Conny Aerts, an astronomer at KU Leuven in Belgium, said: “Starfish teach us a lot about stars, especially their inner workings. . . in the same way that earthquakes help us understand what is happening inside our planet. ” Although Gaia was launched in 2013 primarily to map stars, it also catalogs other objects, from millions of galaxies far beyond our own galaxy to asteroids in our solar system. The telescope begins to detect planets orbiting the stars it investigates, known as exoplanets. Anthony Brown, president of the Gaia Data Analysis Consortium, said that so far about 200 possible planets have been identified elsewhere in our galaxy “but it should be able to locate tens of thousands of exoplanets as we receive more data.” Video: FT interviews astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti in space