A billion stars in one handy map

Here is the first catalogue of more than a billion stars from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite – the largest all-sky survey of celestial objects to date.

On its way to assembling the most detailed 3-D map ever made of our Milky Way galaxy, Gaia pinned down the precise position on the sky and the brightness of 1,142 million stars.

This map shows the density of stars observed by Gaia in each portion of the sky. Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky with fewer stars.