Milky Way in 3D: Telescope built in Britain maps a billion stars

A space telescope built in Britain has enabled scientists to create the highest-ever resolution map of the night sky.

Gaia has scanned the brightness and position of more than one billion stars and other celestial objects.

And it has plotted the distance and movement of two million stars.

The scale of the European Space Agency project is already unprecedented.

So much data is being downloaded from the spacecraft that scientists hope next year to be able to track the positions of stars back through time.

That should give them clues to the origins and evolution of the Milky Way.

Professor Gerry Gilmore, the mission's UK principle investigator, told Sky News: "It is the coronation of 25 years of hard work and excitement and anticipation. Today, the revolution begins.

"The basic question we are asking is: where did the Milky Way come from? What holds it together? Why is it the shape it is and why is it moving the way it is? Why does the sun move the way it does?

"The next big question is what about all the other stars? Where do they come from?

"The next big thing is ... we can weigh things. That tells us what's really there - not just what we can see.

"We are going to weigh the Milky Way very accurately.

"We know there is this mysterious dark matter. We know there's more of that than anything else in the universe, but we've got no idea what else it is.

"Whatever it is, it is reality and we are just froth on the coffee."

Gaia has two telescopes linked to a camera with a resolution of one billion pixels.

The sensor was built by e2v Technologies in Chelmsford and the spacecraft assembled by Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage.

Its instruments are so accurate they could measure the thickness of a human hair from a distance of 1,000km.

Gaia is proving so reliable and resilient to cosmic radiation that it is able to detect much fainter stars than expected - and the original five mission is being extended to 10.

It's hoped that Gaia will eventually map 1.6 billion stars, a little more than 1% of our galaxy.

By comparison around six to 7,000 stars are visible with the naked eye from Earth.

Gaia is also expected to map 70,000 Jupiter-sized planets and tens of thousands of asteroids and comets.

The spacecraft was launched in December 2013 and is positioned around 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

The Milky Way contains 100 to 400 billion stars and measures around 120,000 light years (11,000 quadrillion km) across.

Our solar system is located on one arm of the galaxy, around 25,000 light years from the galactic centre.

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