We use to say that is impossible to count the stars on the sky. Still, a map of the Milky Way that has an unprecedented precision and that localized 1.142 million of stars starting from the observations of the European Telescope Gaia, was presented by the ESA (The European Space Agency). Anthony Brown, member of the Gaia researching team, stated in a press conference in Madrid that, with over one billion stars, this is the biggest and the most exact map ever made from one single mission. It is a stocktaking record even if this thing represents less than 1% of the Milky Way’s stars, the galaxy which our solar system belongs to and which probably has between 100 and 200 billion stars. For two million of these stars, the scientists coming from 25 European countries offered the researches from all over the world the data regarding the stars’ displacement speed and their distance away from the Sun.

ESA and the European consortium that administrates the Gaia satellite prefigure to get, at the end of 2017, data regarding the distance for the whole billion of stars identified so far. This catalog – the most detailed 3D map ever made for the Milky Way and the most complex review of the Celeste objects until now – will allow the researchers to understand better the physical phenomena that govern the stars and the Galaxy, which has 100.000 light years in diameter. The data that served as basics of this map making were collected during the 14 months of scientific activity of the satellite – July 2014 until September 2015, according to the ESA website. Launched on December 19, 2013, the European Telescope called Gaia records the data of 50 million stars every day. It was launched from a Soyuz rocket at the Guyana Spatial Center.