ALT Screenshot extract of the webpage: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr4 showing the content of the main source catalogues.
ALT Orbit of the Gaia spacecraft relative to Earth at various dates.
ALT This image consists of two sides. Left side: A top-down view of a spiral galaxy is shown. It has a bright central bulge with several spiral arms radiating outward. Overlaid on the lower part of the galaxy is a data visualisation, with colours ranging from blue to red. A label reading ‘Sun’ marks a specific location within this overlay. Right side: An edge-on view of the same spiral galaxy is presented. It reveals the galaxy's thin disc and central bulge from the side. Coloured points are scattered along the disc, representing the same data as the overlay on the left side.
ALT The image features a dark background with a thin, bright horizontal line running across the centre. This is our galaxy’s disc. Above and below this line, numerous white arrows point upward and downward. These arrows vary in length and are spread evenly along the line. Scattered among the arrows are small red and blue dots. The visual resembles an astronomical data visualisation, illustrating positions and motions of stars in our galaxy.
ALT A sea of stars and galaxies sparkle against a black background. Several galaxies can be identified by their elongated shape and/or spiral arms. Some galaxies are seen edge-on while one prominent spiral galaxy at the bottom centre is seen face-on. At the far right, between the middle and top of the image, are some interacting galaxies. Galaxy clusters are also seen, in particular near bottom centre, where features smeared into arcs represent gravitational lensing. The brightest stars in the image have diffraction spikes.
ALT An artist’s concept looks down into the core of the galaxy M87, which is just left of centre and appears as a large blue dot. A bright blue-white, narrow and linear jet of plasma transects the illustration from centre left to upper right. It begins at the source of the jet, the galaxy’s black hole, which is surrounded by a blue spiral of material. At lower right is a red giant star that is far from the black hole and close to the viewer. A bridge of glowing gas links the star to a smaller white dwarf star companion immediately to its left. Engorged with infalling hydrogen from the red giant star, the smaller star exploded in a blue-white flash, which looks like numerous diffraction spikes emitted in all directions. Thousands of stars are in the background.
ALT Several bright stars shine in yellow, orange, and white hues. The stars have diffraction spikes, and two are particularly large just above and below the image's center. The background is full of dark brown dust and gas that covers most of the diagonal right half of the view, with pale blue gas glowing in the upper left section.
ALT A black background sprinkled with small, colourful galaxies in orange, blue, and white. On the left, a third of the way down from the top of the image, a very faint dot of a galaxy is outlined with a white square and pulled out in a graphic to be shown magnified. In the pullout square to the right, the galaxy is a hazy white dot edged in orange, with faint blue projections opposite each other at the 11 o’clock and 5 o’clock positions.
ALT An artist’s concept looks down into the core of the galaxy M87, which is just left of centre and appears as a large blue dot. A bright blue-white, narrow and linear jet of plasma transects the illustration from centre left to upper right. It begins at the source of the jet, the galaxy’s black hole, which is surrounded by a blue spiral of material. At lower right is a red giant star that is far from the black hole and close to the viewer. A bridge of glowing gas links the star to a smaller white dwarf star companion immediately to its left. Engorged with infalling hydrogen from the red giant star, the smaller star exploded in a blue-white flash, which looks like numerous diffraction spikes emitted in all directions. Thousands of stars are in the background.
ALT A black background sprinkled with small, colourful galaxies in orange, blue, and white. On the left, a third of the way down from the top of the image, a very faint dot of a galaxy is outlined with a white square and pulled out in a graphic to be shown magnified. In the pullout square to the right, the galaxy is a hazy white dot edged in orange, with faint blue projections opposite each other at the 11 o’clock and 5 o’clock positions.