That ended today when the European Space Agency (ESA) released its long-awaited , which reveals the exact distances and motions of the closest 1.3 billion stars to our solar system, plus data for hundreds of thousands more. When the first star map of Gaia was officially launched in 2016, it contained figures relating to the brightness and location of 1.1 billion stars, which was an incredible feat at the time. Here is the new Gaia release by the numbers:

In that 22-month timespan, Gaia looked at 1.7 billion stars up to 8,000 light-years away and measured their positions and brightness. The light they collect is funneled to three instruments, and its astro-metric detector records stars as they cross its field of view, calculating positions, proper motion and parallax. As well as positions, the data include brightness information of all surveyed stars and colour measurements of nearly all, plus information on how the brightness and colour of half a million variable stars change over time. A satellite that for almost five years has been anchored in an orbit of the sun about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, the ESA’s €750 million (US$915 million) Gaia space observatory has been on a mission to produce a highly detailed star chart of our Milky Way and its neighboring galaxies that is 10,000 times more detailed than what we had before. Gaia also observes objects in our Solar System: the second data release comprises the positions of more than 14 000 known asteroids, which allows precise determination of their orbits.
The European Space Agency releases the largest-ever 3D map of stars in our galaxy from the Gaia spacecraft.