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Astronomycast, episode 365, Gaia.

Welcome to Astronomycast from Weekly Facts based journey through the Cosmos, where we'll help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kane, I'm the publisher of Universe Day, and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and the Director of Cosmos, hey Pamela, how you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you?

Doing great. And just wanted to let people know. We get a lot of questions. I don't know. We get a lot of questions sent to me specifically. A lot of questions sent to you, I know specifically.

And then we get questions sent to Astronomycast. And then we get questions everywhere else. And I just wanted to encourage people like it's too many for us to answer.

I don't know what you too many. We try by emailing stuff. But the best way to send us a question is actually to cue your question up for the show.

And the way to do that is you go to the Astronomycast page on Google Plus, and you'll see what the next show is. And we always queue up the shows a week in advance.

And you can go on that and you can click on the Q&A app, which is available a week in advance, or on the actual event page itself. And just post your question there.

And then we actually set aside half an hour of every single show that we record, where we just answer questions from the public. And that is the absolute best way. And so we will look through. And so we often run out of questions.

It's very ironic. We run out of questions for the live show. But yet we have tons and tons of questions that come in by email that we just don't have time to deal with.

So that is the best way to kind of get our attention and get in front of us. And when we're in a question answering kind of mood. So if you are interested in that, just when you want to ask us a question, go to the Astronomycast page on Google Plus, see the next show.

So put your question into the event page. I promise you I'll be watching it every week. So you agree, Pamela? Yes, yes, I do.

All right. And also, I also highly recommend you go to the Cosmo Quest community. And so there's a great forum there. Lots of people who want to answer your questions about space and astronomy. Some of the best people we know.

Yeah. All right. Let's get cracking with this episode of the show.

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So the European guys spacecraft launched about a year ago with the ambitious goal of mapping one billion stars in the Milky Way. That's 1% of all the stars in our entire galaxy, which will monitor about 70 times over its five-year mission.

Bog was well, won an enormous amount about the structure, movements and evolution of the stars in our galaxy. They'll even find some quasars and maybe planets. All right.

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