Gaia survey provides location and motion of 1.3 million binary pairs within 3,000 light years of Earth. A doctoral student has mined the most recent Gaia survey for all binary stars near Earth and created a 3D atlas of 1.3 million of them. The last local survey included about 200 binary pairs. With such census data, astronomers can conduct statistical analyses on binary populations. For pairs that contain white dwarfs, it’s possible to determine the age of their main-sequence companion, and thus of any exoplanets around them.
The latest star data from the Gaia space observatory has for the first time allowed astronomers to generate a massive 3D atlas of widely separated binary stars within about 3,000 l...
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