The ESA will passivate Gaia on 27 March 2025, the one-of-a-kind observatory craft that unravelled many of the Milky Way's hidden secrets.

ESA's Gaia mission has discovered the closest and 2nd closest black holes to Earth found yet. In this animation, travel to latter, black hole Gaia BH2, and see what makes it unique. Credit: ...

ESA’s decade-long Milky Way Gaia mapping mission still has tons of data to release over the next few years. Expect surprises.

Goodnight Gaia. The European Space Agency star-tracking satellite ceased operations on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025, after 12 years of mapping the Milky Way.

In a few short years, there will be “more AI agents than humans on Earth acting on the internet,” said Gaia CEO Matt Wright. ...

In the meantime, there remains a chance to glimpse Gaia through a small telescope before its final retirement. Uwe Lammers, ...

Gaia is first and foremost a map maker ... finding the two closest black holes to Earth (which may even be a new class of black holes), and finding the ancient heart of the Milky Way.

Soon, the Gaia spacecraft will leave orbit and begin its retirement in the depths of space. In the last 10 years, it has ...

Once all of Gaia's data has been downloaded to Earth, work will begin on GR5, the final data release from the spacecraft. This will be a monster data dump containing stellar observations collected ...