Largest map of the milky way

The largest map of the milky way consists of 1.811 billion mapped stars and was achieved by the European Space Agency's Gaia Space Observatory, as published in data from the ESA on 3 December 2020.

Gaia is a mission to create a three-dimensional map of our Milky Way Galaxy including the stars and their positional and radial velocity measurements with unparalleled measurement accuracy. The mission is not yet complete, and the final data is expected to be released after the spacecraft ceases operation in 2020.

One billion stars still only account for about one percent of the total number of stars in our galaxy. However, the existence of such a large and accurate map will allow scientists to find new exoplanets and quasars, understand the evolution of stars and test scientific theories such as Einstein’s theory of general relativity.