European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite<\/a>, to learn more about the evolution of our Galaxy and what that means for our Solar System.<\/p>\nGaia operated for just over 10 years, finishing its mission in 2025, and in that time measured the positions, distances and motions of about two billion stars to produce the largest 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy ever made.<\/p>\n
![\"Gaia's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gaia_Milky_Way_Image_-ESAGaiaDPAC-CC-BY-SA-3.0-IGO-5e7ebb3.jpg\")
Gaia’s all-sky view of the Milky Way based on the measurements of almost 1.7 billion stars. Credit: ESA – ESA\/Gaia\/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO<\/p>\n
This data proved invaluable to the galactic archaeology team, led by Daisuke Taniguchi from Tokyo Metropolitan University and Takuji Tsujimoto from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.<\/p>\n
They conducted a study of solar ‘twins’, i.e. stars with similar temperature, surface gravity and composition to our Sun.<\/p>\n
Using Gaia data, the team produced a catalogue of 6,594 stellar twins, then used that to get an accurate view of the ages of the stars.<\/p>\n
They say they also corrected for ‘selection bias’ of stars that are easier to see.<\/p>\n
![\"Trails](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/gaia-star-motion.jpg\")
Trails on an image of the Milky Way showing how 40,000 nearby stars will move across the sky in the next 400 thousand years. Credit: ESA\/Gaia\/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgement: A. Brown, S. Jordan, T. Roegiers, X. Luri, E. Masana, T. Prusti and A. Moitinho
\nA clue to stellar migration<\/p>\n
The team say they noticed a broad peak for stars around 4 to 6 billion years old, including our Sun, positioned around the same distance from the centre of the Galaxy.<\/p>\n
They say this means our Sun is not at its current position by accident, but was part of a larger stellar migration.<\/p>\n
And, the team say, this discovery doesn’t just affect what we know about our Solar System, but what we know about the evolution of our Galaxy itself.<\/p>\n
In particular, it tells the team a lot about the so-called ‘corotation barrier’, which is a known bar-like structure at the centre of the Milky Way that should make it difficult for stars to escape from the core.<\/p>\n
The team say the corotation barrier wouldn’t allow for such a mass migration of stars, unless it was still being formed at the time.<\/p>\n
That means the ages of the Sun and its stellar twins reveal not only when the mass migration from the centre of the Galaxy occurred, but the time range over which the bar was formed.<\/p>\n
![\"This](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/milky-way-gaia.jpg\")
Artist\u2019s impression of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA\u2019s Gaia space telescope. Credit: ESA\/Gaia\/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar<\/p>\n
This migration could also have had huge implications for the emergence of life in our Solar System.<\/p>\n
The centre of the Galaxy is a chaotic place, and life is far less likely to emerge there.<\/p>\n
But the migration of our Sun from the centre of the Galaxy brought it into a region where it was much more likely for life to develop. <\/p>\n
That could mean that, without this mass migration of Sun-like stars, life may never have emerged on Earth.<\/p>\n
Read the full paper at Astronomy & Astrophysics<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Our Sun was part of a mass migration of stars from the centre of our Galaxy 4\u20136 billion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":479184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-479183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/479184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Artist's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Luminous-fast-blue-optical-transients.jpg\")
Credit: NASA, ESA, NSF\u2019s NOIRLab, Mark Garlick, Mahdi Zamani<\/p>\n![\"Artist's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/mass-migration-sun-galaxy.jpg\")
Artist’s impression of our Sun and other Sun-like stars migrating from the centre of the Solar System 4\u20136 billion years ago. Credit: NAOJ