"OUR GALAXY - IN THREE DIMENSIONS"

Measuring distances to the stars is one of the great challenges which continues
to face experimental astronomy. The goal of ESA's Hipparcos mission (1981-97)
was to determine accurate distances and space motions of 120,000 stars,
providing further understanding of the formation and evolution of our Galaxy,
and the stars within it. New techniques allow the visualisation of the sky in
three-dimensions. The audience will be able to see how stars move over periods
of millions of years, with sequences illustrating the new insight that the
Hipparcos data give us into the structure of our Galaxy, its age and formation
processes, fields of recently discovered extra-solar planets, and stars which
passed close to the Sun in the geologically recent past. The GAIA mission will
build on the Hipparcos results to map the three-dimensional structure of more
than one billion stars extending throughout our Galaxy.
 

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