LA REVOLUCIÓN GAIA.

Info

The conference is set to take place in the Projection Room of the Planetarium in Madrid on Wednesday, January 15, at 6 PM.

Maximum of 4 invitations per person.

Additionally, the activity will be streamed live on our YouTube channel.

The Gaia satellite from the European Space Agency (ESA) is creating an unprecedented map of our Galaxy with unmatched precision since its launch in December 2013. This groundbreaking mission is transforming the field of astronomy, offering new insights into the origin and evolution of the Milky Way. The talk will cover the mission, the strategy Gaia employs to observe the Universe, and analyze the key discoveries made so far based on just a small portion of the data collected before Gaia must conclude its scientific observations due to the consumption of the necessary operational 'fuel'.

The most recent data release, which occurred in June 2022, includes information accumulated during the first three years of the mission. This data provides precise positions for over 1.8 billion objects and has led to significant findings, including the distribution of different asteroid populations within our Solar System, the material found between stars, physical parameters of hundreds of millions of stars, and the accuracy of their distances. It has also resulted in the detection of tens of thousands of new binary systems and millions of new variable stars, alongside revelations about the violent history of collisions and galactic cannibalism that our galaxy has experienced over billions of years.

In the coming years, two more data releases are planned, slated for 2026 and 2030, which will include critical information from the mission's first five and a half years and the entirety of data collected over nearly 11 years, respectively. The extension of observations over a more extended period is anticipated to enhance existing scientific results and could open new avenues of research that were previously unimaginable. Possible future discoveries from Gaia will also be discussed.

Dr. Pedro García Lario

Astrophysicist at the European Space Astronomy Center (ESAC) of the European Space Agency (ESA). He holds a degree in Physics from the Complutense University of Madrid and a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of La Laguna, focusing on the formation of planetary nebulae using data from the IRAS space mission. He is an expert in Galactic Astronomy and Stellar Evolution with over 100 scientific articles to his name, including featured works in Nature and Science. Over his 25-year career at ESA, he has contributed to numerous space missions such as IUE, ISO, Akari, and Herschel, fulfilling various roles. He is currently a member of the Scientific Operations Center for the Gaia space mission.