Most accurate star map

The most accurate star map consists of 1.811 billion stars and was achieved by the European Space Agency's Gaia Space Observatory, as published in data from ESA on 3 December 2020.

Gaia is a mission to create a three-dimensional map of our Milky Way Galaxy including the stars and their positional and radial velocity measurements with an unparalleled measurement accuracy. The mission is not yet complete, and the final data is expected to be released after the spacecraft ceases operation in 2020. The accuracy of the map ranges based on how far the stars are from us but is as high as 0.001% for the stars nearest to our Solar System.

One billion stars still only accounts for about one percent of the total number of stars in our galaxy. However, the existence of such a large and accurate map will allow scientists to find new exoplanets and quasars, understand the evolution of stars and test scientific theories such as Einstein’s theory of general relativity.