The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a trove of data on nearly 2 billion stars in the Milky Way, collected by its Gaia mission in an effort to create the most accurate and complete map of Earth’s galaxy.
Astronomers hope to use the data to better understand how stars are born and die, and how the Milky Way evolved over billions of years.
The new data — including new information such as the age, mass, temperature and chemical composition of stars — can be used, for example, to determine which stars were born in another galaxy and then migrated to the