Behold a Billion Stars in This Stunning New Map of the Milky Way

The European Space Agency just released a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way galaxy that charts the location of over a billion celestial objects.

The new 3D map reflects the first 14 months of data collected by ESA’s Gaia satellite. Launched on December 19, 2013, Gaia orbits the Sun-Earth second Lagrange point (L2), which lies beyond the moon’s orbit, approximately one million miles from Earth. The map is the mission’s first publicly available data, which was collected through September of 2015. Read more

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