http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/new-3d-map-of-milky-way-will-revolutionise-astronomy/news-story/b511f3ea41777d895e72d0bd426a2510

EUROPE’S Gaia satellite has produced a 3-D map, hailed as revolutionary, of our Milky Way galaxy — complete with their distance from Earth, colour, and motion through space.

The eagerly-anticipated catalogue, published Wednesday, was compiled from data Gaia gathered on some 1.7 billion stars.

Launched in 2013, Gaia started operating the following year, gathering data on 100,000 stars per minute — some 500 million measurements per day. Its first map was published in September 2016, based on a year’s worth of observations of about 1.15 billion stars.

For some of the brightest stars in the survey, the level of precision equates to Earth-bound observers being able to spot a Euro coin lying on the surface of the Moon.

The full data will be published in a series of scientific papers in a special issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, laying the foundation for decades of further study.

More brilliant data plots from gizmodo https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/04/incredible-new-view-of-the-milky-way-is-the-largest-star-map-ever/amp and from esa http://sci.esa.int/gaia/60192-gaia-creates-richest-star-map-of-our-galaxy-and-beyond/

http://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/visualization/

This is how much of the Milky Way has been mapped by GAIA. And how fast the stars are travelling.

I certainly wasn’t expecting this. This is how fast the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies and globular clusters are orbiting. These are very much further away than GAIA’s range, so how did it do it?

Note how the large and small Magellanic clouds are travelling in the same direction. They are linked together. Also the Carina and Fornax galaxies are headed in the same direction. But at different speeds. Are they also linked?

Here are the orbits of asteroids and planets around the Sun. Earth’s orbit is not shown. The orbit of Mars is hidden under those of asteroids. The outer white orbit is Jupiter but is the inner one Venus or Mercury or the Moon? And why not all? Perhaps Mercury is too close to the Sun for GAIA to see.

Here’s a more interesting picture. A 3-D fly-through of the asteroid belt. Note how the orbit of Mercury is not circular.

https://dlmultimedia.esa.int/download/public/videos/2018/04/025/1804_025_AR_EN.mp4

Wanted. A 3-D viewer that allows me to navigate through all the GAIA data. Both with fixed stars, and with moving stars. So I can see in 3-D how all the stars will move over the next 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 years in different coordinate systems.