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  • NEWS FEATURE

Hidden history of the Milky Way revealed by extensive star maps

Data from the Gaia spacecraft are radically transforming how we see the evolution of our Galaxy.
  1. Adam Mann

    1. Adam Mann is a freelance journalist based in Oakland, California.

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Last April, Amina Helmi felt goose bumps while driving to work in the northern Netherlands. It had nothing to do with the weather — it was pure anticipation. Just days earlier, a flood of data had been released from Gaia, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that has been mapping the Milky Way for five years. The University of Groningen astronomer and her team were racing to comb through the data for insights about the Galaxy before others got there first.

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Nature 565, 284-286 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00123-y

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