The European Space Agency released a trove of data Monday on almost 2 billion stars in the Milky Way, collected by its Gaia space observatory in an effort to create the most accurate and complete map of our galaxy. Astronomers hope to use the data to understand better how stars are born and die, and how the Milky Way evolved over billions of years. The new data includes new information such as the age, mass, temperature and chemical composition of stars. This can be used, for example, to determine which stars were born in another galaxy and then migrated to the Milky Way. Also read: SpaceX launches 4 astronauts for NASA after private flight "This is an incredible gold mine for astronomy,” said Antonella Vallenari, who helped lead a consortium of 450 scientists and engineers who spent years turning the measurements collected by the space probe into usable data. Gaia was also able to detect more than 100,000 starquakes, which the ESA likened to large tsunamis that ripple across stars. They appear to make the stars blink and allow scientists to deduce their density, interior rotation and inside temperature, astrophysicist Conny Aerts said. Although it has only collected information on about 1% of the Milky Way's stars, the Gaia mission is already providing the basis for around 1,600 scientific publications a year. Project scientist Timo Prusti said the sheer number of stars observed makes it more likely that scientists will make very rare discoveries. “You have to observe a lot of objects in order to get the needle in the haystack,” he said. ESA chief Josef Aschbacher said having more data also allows astronomers to understand some of the forces at play in the galaxy, such as the way our own solar system is being thrown about inside the Milky Way. Also read: Space telescope launched on daring quest to behold 1st stars “It is enabling things that would never be possible without this large number of data,” he said. The Gaia data now being released also includes information on 800,000 binaries — stars that move in tandem with each other — as well as several new exoplanets, hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the solar system and millions of objects beyond our galaxy.

The world's first image of the chaotic supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy doesn't portray a voracious cosmic destroyer but what astronomers Thursday called a “gentle giant" on a near-starvation diet. Astronomers believe nearly all galaxies, including our own, have these giant black holes at their bustling and crowded center, where light and matter cannot escape, making it extremely hard to get images of them. Light gets bent and twisted around by gravity as it gets sucked into the abyss along with superheated gas and dust. The colorized image unveiled Thursday is from an international consortium behind the Event Horizon Telescope, a collection of eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. Getting a good image was a challenge; previous efforts found the black hole too jumpy. "It burbled and gurgled as we looked at it," the University of Arizona's Feryal Ozel said. She described it as a “gentle giant” while announcing the breakthrough along with other astronomers involved in the project. The picture also confirms Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity: The black hole is precisely the size that Einstein's equations dictate. It is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around our sun. Black holes gobble up galactic material but Ozel said this one is “eating very little.” It's the equivalent to a person eating a single grain of rice over millions of years, another astronomer said. Also read: Earth given 50-50 chance of hitting key warming mark by 2026 “Pictures of black holes are the hardest thing to think about,” said astronomer Andrea Ghez of the University of California, Los Angeles. She wasn't part of the telescope team bu t earned a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Milky Way's black hole in the 1990s. She said the image of “my baby” is exactly how it should be — an eerie-looking orange-red ring with utter blackness in the middle. Scientists had expected the Milky Way's black hole to be more violent, especially since the only other image from another galaxy shows a far bigger and more active black hole. “It is the cowardly lion of black holes,” said project scientist Geoffrey C. Bower of Taiwan's Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Because the black hole “is on a starvation diet” so little material is falling into the center, and that allows astronomers to gaze deeper, Bower said. The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A (with an asterisk denoting star). It's near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations and is 4 million times more massive than our sun. Bower said it is probably more typical of what’s at the center of most galaxies, “just sitting there doing very little.” Also read: US astronaut ends record-long spaceflight in Russian capsule It is incredibly hot, trillions of degrees, Ozel said. The same telescope group released the first black hole image in 2019. The picture was from a galaxy 53 million light-years away that is 1,500 times bigger than the one in our galaxy. The Milky Way black hole is much closer, about 27,000 light-years away. A light year is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). To get the picture, the eight telescopes had to coordinate so closely “in a process similar to everyone shaking hands with everyone else in the room,” said astronomer Vincent Fish of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Astronomers worked with data collected in 2017 to get the new images. The next step is a movie of one of those two black holes, maybe both, Fish said. The project cost nearly $60 million with $28 million coming from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Even though it is quieter than expected, the center of the Milky Way is an important place to study, Ghez said. It's "like an urban downtown, everything is more extreme. It's crowded. Things move fast,” Ghez said in an interview. “We live out in the suburbs (in a spiral arm of the galaxy). Things are calm out here.”

Washington, Oct. 7 (Xinhua/UNB) -- Astronomers found that an expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, like a titanic lighthouse beam, more than 3 million years ago.