Watch our changing galaxy 5 million years into the future

ESA video traces motion of 2 million stars in the Milky Way

MILKY WAY GALAXY – Watch five million years in our galaxy change right before your eyes.

A new video released by the European Space Agency Thursday shows two million stars changing and moving through the Milky Way during the course of five million years into the future.

The timelapse video was created using observations from ESA’s Gaia satellite, designed to detect stellar motions with high precision observations.

It’s a small sample of what Gaia will eventually do.

Gaia has been in operation since July 2014, “scanning the sky repeatedly to obtain the most detailed 3D map of our galaxy every made,” according to the ESA.

A star’s motion is too small and slow to be seen with the naked eye, but Gaia is positioned more than 93,0000 miles from Earth, facing away from the sun. The spacecraft’s telescopes and imaging system each have an area of focus to map in high definition, up to 3 million stars per square degree, according to the ESA.

An view of 2 million stars from the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution, one of the products of the first data release from ESA's Gaia mission.

English astronomer Edmond Halley, the namesake of Halley’s Comet, first discovered the changes in stars in the 18th century.

Gaia's next big data release will be in April 2018 and will include the positions, distances and motions of more than one billion stars-- and that is only 1 percent of the Milky Way’s stellar population.

Feeling kind of small now?


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