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Data from ESA's Gaia mission has been used to create an 3D animated view of the Milky Way galaxy's stellar nurseries.

CREDIT
European Space Agency (ESA)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Animation: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, S. Payne-Wardenaar, L. McCallum et al (2025), CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
LICENCE
CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence
(content can be used under either licence)
Transcript
00:00Imagine that you're looking at the Milky Way from another galaxy.
00:04No spacecraft can travel beyond our galaxy, so we can't take an actual photo.
00:09But thanks to our Gaia spacecraft, scientists have built the most accurate 3D map of regions
00:15where stars are forming in our Milky Way. This map is based on Gaia's observations
00:23of 44 million ordinary stars and 87 O-type stars. These star-forming regions are well studied.
00:33Many telescopes have captured stunning images of them. But now, for the first time,
00:39we know what they look like in three dimensions and from an outside perspective.
00:46This new animation reaches out to 4,000 light years from the Sun,
00:51giving us our best ever 3D views of where stars are born in our cosmic neighbourhood.
01:33We have a list where stars are born in the sky.
01:33This new animation opens much more than 5,000 light years from above.
01:33A major one is the three-dimensional domain.
01:35And this is where we can actually use the same detected.
01:39And one of the most important things is the same footage in a beautiful face that happens.
01:50This is a significant segment of this that happens at 6K.
02:19Transcription by CastingWords
02:26CastingWords
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