The whole purpose of Gaia is to precisely measure the position of stars (and other objects). Once positions are known, a 3D model can be built. But how are the distances measured? The answer is parallax, essentially triangulation. You look for very small changes of position against the background sky. You use the width of the earth's orbit as the baseline and measure at different times of the year.
All of these are "Artist's Impressions". My best guess is they run a simulation based on the data from the spacecraft and then can pan the camera around as they see fit
[Image Description: A model image of what our home galaxy, the Milky Way, might look like edge-on, against a pitch-black backdrop. The Milky Way’s disc appears in the centre of the image, as a thin, dark-brown line spanning from left to right, with the hint of a wave in it. The line appears to be etched into a thin glowing layer of silver sand, that makes it look as if it was drawn with a coloured pencil on coarse paper. The bulge of the galaxy sits like a glowing, see-through pearl in the shape of a sphere in the centre of this brown line.]
That's an AI produced accessibility description so I thought it seemed wrong. But more directly from the article text:
This is a new artist’s impression of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope.
The face-on galaxy image is credited to Stefan Payne-Wardenaar (https://stefanpw.myportfolio.com/home), whose Twitter and Bluesky bios say, "I make astronomy visualizations in Blender."
"This is a new artist’s impression of our galaxy, the Milky Way, based on data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope."
I'm sure you know of headlines vs details; when it comes down to it, space science relies on marketing to get some funding and interest in it, and using 100% accurate headlines is not good marketing.
It can't. The galaxy is assumed to be roughly symmetrical, and they fill in the missing data with what we can see on our side of the galaxy. It's "best" in the sense that it's the most accurate fiction, I suppose.
The Milky Way is maybe 100,000 light years in diameter. So we're only getting good distance readings on a small fraction, and nothing behind the central bulge of our galaxy. The first won't improve until we send an astrometry telescope way outside the orbit of the Earth, for better baselines, and the second is going to need a telescope sent 10,000 light years out of the galactic ecliptic.
> mass at least a hundred thousand times more than our sun
The sun is 99.86% of the mass of solar system. So if you orbit the centre of mass of the solar system, you orbit the sun, more or less. Give or take a small correction for Jupiter.
But ... there are a lot more than a hundred thousand stars in the milky way. So if I guess right, the ratio of central mass vs the rest would be very different for the Milky way? It's more of a blob.
It's not a singular source of gravity at the center though, it's the collection of all mass in the galaxy interacting with each other as well. Like a daisy chain of gravity, which explains why it looks like a spiral instead of an evenly distributed circle.
(I think anyway, I just made it up, I'm not learned in this area, just a HN shitposter)
No. Does this mean that solar systems will eventually be consumed by the stars at their centre, planets falling out of their orbits due to gravity? It does not. Gravity doesn't work like that.
The planets may be consumed, when the star runs out of fuel and swells a lot, and such is the Earth's fate. But that scenario is not one that happens to black holes.
The Big Crunch has nothing to do with Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy. No theories actually predict that it will consume all stars in our galaxy.
> is there some sort of gravitational body in the middle that makes everything orbit in galaxies?
No. The Sun's orbit is determined by the total mass of stars, gas, and dark matter interior to the orbit. This is mostly due to the stars (we're not far enough out from the center for dark matter to be the dominant component) and is on the order of several tens of billions of solar masses.
(There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, but its mass is only about 4 million solar masses, so it's negligibly small compared to the mass of all the stars.)
The same way that the Earth can orbit the centre of mass of the solar system and also be within the solar system. We say that the Earth orbits the Sun because that's where 99.86% of the mass of the solar system is located.
The Sun in turn orbits the the centre of mass of the Milky Way. But I don't think that the mass of the Milky way's central supermassive black hole dominates in the same way.
But the earth doesn't orbit around the solar system. it orbits around the sun as part of the solar system. the solar system as a unit orbits around the center of the galaxy. if you've ever seen the concept images of the Oort cloud, you could visualize that snowball looking roundish object as a visual for the solar system traveling through the galaxy.
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Two of my favorites: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/The_best_Milk...
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2025/01/The_best_M...