The European Space Agency launched the Gaia mission in 2013. The mission’s overall goal was to discover the history of the Milky Way by mapping out the positions and velocities of one billion stars. The result is kind of like a movie that shows the past and the future of our galaxy.

The mission has released two separate, massive data sets for researchers to work through, with a third data release expected soon. All that data has spawned a stream of studies into our home galaxy.

Recently, the ESA drew attention to five new insights into the Milky Way galaxy. All of these discoveries directly stemmed from the Gaia spacecraft.

Gaia’s job was to create the largest, most precise, catalog of stars in the Milky Way. It’s gathered data on one billion objects, mostly stars but also some quasars, comets, and other objects. Gaia monitored each of its target objects 70 separate times, which accounts for the data’s precision. Its mission was originally planned for five years, but it’s been extended because it has enough fuel to operate until about November 2024.