Tuesday, December 30, 2008

GAIA

The european space agency project ,Gaia (Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics)will test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity to the limits when it checks the perturbing effect of gravity on starlight to better than one part in a million. Gaia is a mission that will conduct a census of about one thousand million stars in our Galaxy. It will monitor each of its target stars about 70 times during a five-year period, precisely charting their positions, distances, movements and changes in brightness. Gaia is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as extra-solar planets and failed stars called brown dwarfs. Within our own Solar System, Gaia should identify hundreds of thousands of asteroids.It will be launched on december 2011 (Soyuz rocket from French Guiana).Gaia's measurements will be so accurate that, if it were on Earth, it could measure the thumbnails of a person on the Moon.Estimates suggest that Gaia will detect about 15 000 planets beyond our Solar System. It will do this by watching out for tiny movements in the star's position caused by the minute gravitational pull of the planet on the star.-By www.esa.int

This is my kind of search. We can find dark matter by next mission after this mission.There is another experiment LHC(Switzerland),which may detect new unknown particals.

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