Gaia Mission:
Astronomers have recently discovered a gigantic black hole named Gaia BH3 hiding close to the earth, the third of its kind using the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope.Gaia, the Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics, is a European Space Agency (ESA)’s astronomical observatory mission.
- Its goal is to create the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of the Milky Way by surveying about 1% of the galaxy’s 100 billion stars.
- It was launched in 2013.
- Nestled at the Lagrange Point 2, some 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth, Gaia orbits the sun in sync with our planet.
- It is shielded by Earth from the sun’s glare and free from the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere, which plague ground-based telescopes’ observations.
- It scans the whole sky every two months.
- The 2.3 meters Gaia satellite is attached to a 10 meters circular sunshield and is fitted with two telescopes that sit 106 degrees apart.
- Gaia provides unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy.
- Gaia also maps Solar System objects, primarily main belt asteroids circling the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
- With its ability to detect faint and fast-moving objects, it is expected that Gaia will also detect several thousand Near-Earth Objects (NEOs).
