Milky Way Motion In 3D

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Astronomy, Cosmology, Earth & Space Science, Nature of Science

Ed Hessler 

I'd not only never seen the Milky Way like this; I hadn't even conceived it might look like this image from Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). It is "alive" APOD writes, "with the streams of stars."

The image is from the Gaia Mission, " an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies need to produce stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population." The number the remaining 99% bowl me over.(My underline).

It is another image that adds to my delighted wonder - now a little more informed - about the structure of the Milky Way as well as in the engineers, scientists, technicians who made it possible. Thanks, too,  to the policy makers who made the decisions to fund such an ambitious project. 

I was reminded of the symbol for Yin and Yang--in the horizontal.