Gaia telescope captures the Milky Way’s great wave

Gaia Discovers Our Galaxy’s Great Wave

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Our Milky Way galaxy never sits still: it rotates and wobbles. And now, data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope reveal that our galaxy also has a giant wave rippling outwards from its centre. The Milky Way’s great wave illustrated. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, S. Payne-Wardenaar, E. Poggio et […]

Gaia telescope captures the Milky Way’s great wave

The Milky Way galaxy never sits still: it rotates and wobbles. And now, data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope reveal that our galaxy also has a giant wave rippling outwards from its centre. We’ve known for about a hundred years that the galaxy’s stars rotate around its centre, and Gaia has measured their speeds and motions. Since the 1950s, we’ve known that the Milky Way’s disk is warped. Then in 2020 Gaia discovered that th…