Gaia sees strange stars in most detailed Milky Way survey to date

"Strange stars" in the colloquial sense, not as in "stars made from strange quark matter" [0]. The "Chemistry of our Galaxy" video is worth watching imo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_star

> Gaia found strong nonradial starquakes in thousands of stars. Gaia also revealed such vibrations in stars that have seldomly been seen before. These stars should not have any quakes according to the current theory, while Gaia did detect them at their surface.

What does the current theory say and how big of a development is this observation?

Relatedly, given how far we’re starting to push the tech with our observation tools, how certain are we that our observations aren’t synthetic artifacts of the algorithms used to process sensors and generate the results? I’m guessing there’s cross-correlation done with existing observations on other HW/SW that’s used to reduce the probability of that kind of issue. Wonder though if there’s some kind of SW development techniques they employ that could be useful elsewhere in the industry.

-- apparently - this would be what it sounds like if you could hear it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrQ6ATHjQHs --

It’ll be cool once more knowledgeable eyes translate these papers and data into digestible bits for the rest of us. There’s a large release of papers released along with this and findable from the link.

My prediction would be heavier elements increase in occurrence in near the center of the galaxy. But, huge grain of salt.

Are there any plans for a Gaia follow-up? Like sending one out to Jupiter's orbit. Would 10 AU of parallax instead of 2 AU make any dramatic difference in ranging stars farther away from us?

The latest work surveys about 2 billion stars in our galaxy. The size and scope of space is just incredible.

The accuracy and precision achieved in distance measurements is highly impressive.