Astronomers just made a 3D map of over 1 billion stars in our galaxy

Image credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC How far is that star? Despite huge advances in technology, astronomers have always struggled with the basics of celestial geography.  That ended today when the European Space Agency (ESA) released its long-awaited Gaia Archive, which reveals the exact distances and motions of the closest 1.3 billion stars to our solar system, plus …

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