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
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
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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Gaia’s Stellar Family Portrait, an interactive visualisation to explore the data from the second release of ESA's Gaia mission, which has been charting the sky to create the most precise map ever made of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The new visualisation focusses on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a fundamental tool for astronomers to study populations of stars and their evolution.
The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram can be imagined as a stellar family portrait: stars are plotted according to their colour (on the horizontal axis) and brightness (on the vertical axis) and are grouped in different regions of the diagram depending mainly on their masses, chemical composition, ages, and stages in the stellar life cycle. Information about stellar distances is fundamental to calculate the true brightness, or absolute magnitude, of stars.
Dive into the Gaia data at http://sci.esa.int/gaia-stellar-family-portrait/