On June 13, the third major data release from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission revealed details about the past and future of our solar system’s star, the Sun, by using data collected by Gaia on stars of similar mass and composition to our Sun.
Gaia is a star mapping mission and collects massive amounts of data on the intrinsic properties of the billions of stars present in our galaxy and neighboring regions of the universe with every major data release. In this release, named DR3, Gaia examined many parameters of the stars it observed, such as their temperatures, sizes, masses, and much more.