This sky map from Gaia is based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars, showing off the galactic plane, interstellar dust and neighbouring galaxies his almost sombrero-shaped spacecraft has been mapping the stars of our galaxy for nine T years. Its first data release contained unrivalled information on nearly 1.7 billion stars, and is to date the greatest catalogue of stars ever produced. The European Space Agency (ESA) initially had the idea of using Gaia as an optical interferometer mission – meaning that Gaia originally would have been a series of smaller telescopes working together to create an image similar to that of a larger telescope – thus the ESA gave the mission its original name: the Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics, or GAIA. After the mission evolved and the interferometer idea was dropped, the name
