Mapping the stars is, perhaps, the oldest of astronomical pursuits, but it has been perfected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The exquisitely precise map it provides shows the positions and movements of the nearest two billion stars.
Starting with a history of mapping the cosmos, this lecture outlined the new and dynamic history of our Milky Way galaxy that has resulted from this. This new view of our galaxy shows how it has been shaped over billions of years, and is still changing today.
Bibliography
For a discussion of the Nebra disk, and of early Western astronomy more generally see: Garrow, Duncan; Wilkin, Neil (June 2022). The World of Stonehenge. British Museum Press. pp. 145–147.
The Dunhuang star map is described on the International Dunhuang Programme website: https://idp.bl.uk/exhibition/chinese-astronomy/
For a history of mapping the sky, Professor Lintott recommends the Song of Urania podcast: https://songofurania.com/
Early measurements of parallax are given in Reid & Menten, Astronomische Nachrichten, 2020: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11913 and placed in context by Alan Hirshfield in ‘Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos’, 2001, Palgrave Macmillan.
Bessel’s letter to John Herschel can be read at Bessel, 1838, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 4, 152 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1838MNRAS…4..152B/abstract
Gaia Results:
Gaia’s study of the Milky Way’s ‘warp’: Poggio et al. Nature Astronomy, 2020, 4, 590 https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10471
Influence of the Sagittarius dwarf on star formation in the Milky Way: Ruiz-Lara et al., 2020, Nature Astronomy, 4, 965, https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12577
The discovery of the Gaia-Enceladus galaxy: Helmi et al., 2018, Nature, 565, 85: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06038
…and the first of the ‘sausage’ papers is Belokurov et al., 2018, MNRAS, 478, 611 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03414
For an argument that much of the structure is recent, see Donlon et al, 2023, MNRAS, 531, 1422: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/531/1/1422/7675507?login=false
The Gaia study of the Local Bubble is Zucker et al, 2022, Nature, 601, 334: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05124
Discovery of firstGaia Exoplanet : Stefànson et al. 2025, Astronomical Journal, 169, 107 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ada9e1c
Professor Chris Lintott
Gresham Professor of Astronomy (2023-)
Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.
Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He is Principal Investigator of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, ‘The Crowd and the Cosmos’.
Professor Lintott is best known for presenting the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max, with whom he presents the Dog Stars podcast.
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