How Gaia Changed Astronomy Forever

Viewers like you help make PBS (Thank you 😃) . Support your local PBS Member Station here: https://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE The great advances in any science tend to come in sudden leaps. April 25th of 2018 marks the beginning of just such a leap for much of astronomy. In the early hours of the morning, the Gaia mission’s second data release dropped. Our understanding of our own galaxy will never be the same again. You can further support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Get your own Space Time t­-shirt at http://bit.ly/1QlzoBi Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Facebook: facebook.com/pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/pbsspacetime Help translate our videos! https://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel?tab=2&c=UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g Previous Episode: The Star at the End of Time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iWGtQ03OZM The Gaia satellite was launched in late 2013, entirely built and operated by the European Space Agency. It’s primary goal is to map the stars of the Milky Way with a scale and precision orders of magnitude greater than ever before. Gaia’s predecessor, Hipparcos, catalogued 120 thousand stars, Gaia blows it out of the water with positions, colors and brightnesses of nearly 1.7 billion stars. Gaia can see orders of magnitude fainter and further away than previous missions. But its greatest superpower is its precise astrometry – Gaia can pin down a star’s position to the equivalent of a human hair’s width at 1000 km. That’s one-to-two thousand times smaller than the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hosted by Matt O Dowd Written by Drew Rosen and Matt O Dowd Graphics by Grayson Blackmon Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow and Linda Huang Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) Special thanks to our Patreon Big Bang, Quasar and Hypernova Supporters: Big Bang CoolAsCats David Nicklas Anton Lifshits Joey Redner Fabrice Eap Quasar Tambe Barsbay Mayank M. Mehrota Mars Yentur Mark Rosenthal Dean Fuqua Roman Pinchuk ColeslawPurdie Hypernova Edmund Fokschaner Matthew O’Connor Eugene Lawson Barry Hatfield Martha Hunt Joseph Salomone Chuck Zegar Craig Peterson Jordan Young Ratfeast John Hofmann Thanks to our Patreon Gamma Ray Burst Supporters: James Hughes Fabian Olesen Kris Fernet Jane Meyers James Flowers Greg Allen Denys Ivanov Nick Virtue Alexey Eromenko Nicholas Rose Scott Gossett Mark Vasile Patrick Murray Sultan Alkhulaifi Alex Seto Michal-Peanut Karmi Erik Stein Kevin Warne JJ Bagnell Avi Goldfinger John Pettit Florian Stinglmayr Benoit Pagé-Guitard Nathan Leniz Brandon Labonte David Crane Greg Weiss Shannan Catalano Brandon Cook