ASTRONOMY

The European Space Agency's billion-star surveyor, Gaia, has been launched into space on a Soyuz rocket. The Gaia satellite mission will help to collect information on each of the stars in the Milky Way.

Gaia has embarked on a five-year mission to map the stars in 3D with unprecedented precision to discover thousands of previously unknown objects, including exploding stars, planets orbiting other suns, and nearby asteroids.

Gaia is a mission of the European Space Agency with a budget of 650 million euros and aims to create a census of the stars in the Milky Way. Today, there is still no such census and it is much more complicated than it seems because you have to sort about 1 billion objects.

To make the classification of the stars, parallel processing large amounts of data will be needed to observe them. CESGA has been working with a group of researchers from the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Applications of Artificial Intelligence (LIA2) of the Universidade da Coruña led by Carlos and Diego Fustes Dafonte involved in Gaia, and working closely with Ana Ulla, Astronomy and Astrophysics specialist at the University of Vigo in the development of a classification algorithm of stars.

The algorithm has been successfully tested on an existing catalog of 5 million stars within the CESGA on demand Hadoop platform. In the future, this same algorithm, will serve to process the information generated by Gaia and perform an unsupervised classification of the stars of the Milky Way.

There is more details on the work already done in this technical report.
https://www.cesga.es/gl/cesga/publicaciones_corporativas/informes_tecnicos