Most accurate map of our galaxy pinpoints 1.8 billion cosmic objects

Jul 27, 2020
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All those quasars mapped by the Gaia space observatory really pins down our location in the cosmos, it would seem. That should serve to verify the proper motions of all the other objects it has seen within the Milky Way with very high precision. The only problem is time. A great many things will require mapping over extended periods of time before one can detect its actual motion, at least with very distant objects in the galaxy, for which there will be many. There is likely to be some rather chaotic activity in the presumably grand spiral galaxy we call home.

One imagines this "original Gaia data" will now serve as a "time zero" for the human mapping of the our galactic movement in considerable detail. We should all hope it does not discover a super massive black hole on a collision course with our solar system, or worse.
 
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