The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
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Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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ESA’s Gaia data release 3 shows us the speed at which more than 30 million Milky Way stars move towards or away from us. This is called ‘radial velocity’ and it is providing the third velocity dimension in the Gaia map of our galaxy. We can now see how the stars move over a large portion of the Milky Way’s disc.
Thanks to Gaia, we can clearly see that the stars on average do not rotate with circular motions around the centre of the galaxy. This is because our Milky Way is not symmetric around its axis. It is a ‘barred’ spiral galaxy, and the motions reveal the orientation of the central bar.
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Acknowledgements
Author: Alex Lobel - Royal Observatory of Belgium
Simulations: Gaia Sky, GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP free open-source)
Illustrations: Drawing of the Milky Way by R. Hurt and R. Benjamin, 2009
Gaia Data Release 3: Mapping the asymmetric disc of the Milky Way - Gaia Collaboration, R. Drimmel, et al. 2022”