Explained | What is the Gaia space mission and what has it revealed about the Milky Way?

The story so far: The third dataset released by the European Space Agency’s star-mapping Gaia probe, covering almost 1.8 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, has revealed an unexpected phenomena called ‘starquakes’, which are similar to earthquake-like movements but on the surface of stars.

The data has also revealed the largest chemical map of the entire Milky Way, showing the DNA of millions of stars, which includes their age, mass, chemical composition, colour, temperature, and metal content. Besides, the new data has also made discoveries about binary star systems, quasars, asteroids, and exoplanets.