Gaia spots odd star family
This map of the entire sky was created and released by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, and comprises data from more than 1.8 billion stars. It shows the total brightness and colour of stars observed by the satellite and released as part of Gaia’s Early Data Release 3 (Gaia EDR3) in 2020. Overlaid as yellow dots are the locations of over 1000 young stars; these stars make up the newly discovered Ophion family, which will soon have completely dispersed from its stellar nursery and scattered across the Milky Way. Spectroscopic data from Gaia was instrumental to discovering Ophion, which is behaving like no other star family we’ve seen to date.
More information about the underlying Gaia sky map is available here.
[Image description: A large oval fills a rectangular black-background image. The oval represents a projection of our galaxy. Millions of tiny white dots fill the dark oval; a bright white-yellowish band crosses the oval horizontally. Black filaments rise towards the top and the bottom of the image from the bright central band. A scattering of yellow dots overlay the band and filaments, clumped as a rough circle at the centre of the image. These dots show the location of a star family discovered by Gaia. The title of the graphic reads “Gaia spots family of stars eager to leave their birthplace”. A label reads “The Ophion star family” pointing towards the yellow dots. A rendering of the Gaia spacecraft is shown on the left of the oval.]
