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An artist’s map of the Milky Way galaxy, with a circle 3,000 light years in radius centered on the Sun. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Robert Hurt (SSC-Caltech) / Phil Plait (annotation)
Gaia is a European Space Agency mission that orbits the Sun in a stable position about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Its mission is to measure the positions, motions, colors, and other characteristics of over
nearly two billion stars in the galaxy. That s it. It doesn t specify what kind of star to look at (other than it has to be bright enough to see) or drill down to answer a specific question.