Timelapse video shows Milky Way glimmering over Syria's Idlib
A timelapse image shows the Milky Way galaxy glimmering in the night sky over Syria.
A timelapse video the Milky Way galaxy glimmering in the night sky as it eerily lights up an abandoned and destroyed amusement park on the frontline between regime forces and rebel fighters, in the town of al-Nayrab, in Syria's northwestern Idlib region.
The Idlib region provides the best view of the galaxy due to the fact that most areas have no electricity that was destroyed by the civil war.
On the other hand, the Gaia space probe unveiled its latest discoveries in its quest to map the Milky Way in unprecedented details, surveying nearly two million stars and revealing mysterious "starquakes" which sweep across the fiery giants like vast tsunamis.
The mission's third data set, which was released to eagerly waiting astronomers around the world, "revolutionises our understanding of the galaxy," the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher told a press conference that it was "a fantastic day for astronomy" because the data "will open the floodgates for new science, for new findings of our universe, of our Milky Way".
Some of the map's new insights came close to home, such as a catalogue of more than 156,000 asteroids in our Solar System "whose orbits the instrument has calculated with incomparable precision," Francois Mignard, a member of the Gaia team, told reporters.
