Explained | What is the Gaia space mission and what has it revealed about the Milky Way?
An artist’s impression shows Gaia mapping the stars of the Milky Way. Photo: Reuters via European Space Agency The story so far: The third dataset released by the European Space Agency’s star-mapping Gaia probe, covering almost 1.8 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, has revealed an unexpected phenomena called ‘starquakes’, which are similar to…