The Gaia satelitte was launched in December 2013 on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana

Of the billions of stars in the Milky Way, the European Space Agency has charted 1142 million of them. On Wednesday they released a new celestial map which is a 1000 times more complete and 10 times more precise than anything else existing today.

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The Gaia space probe, launched from French Guiana in December 2013, has mapped more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, vastly expanding the inventory of known stars in our galaxy. Gaia stands for Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics, the mission's original name. Its purpose is to assemble the most detailed three-dimensional map ever made of our galaxy.

Released to eagerly waiting astronomers around the world, the initial catalogue of 1.15 billion stars is "both the largest and the most accurate full-sky map ever produced," said French astronomer Francois Mignard, a member of the 450-strong Gaia consortium.

In a webcast press conference at the ESA Astronomy Centre in Madrid, scientists unveiled a stunning map of the Milky Way, including stars up to half a million times fainter than those that can be seen with the naked eye.

The images were captured by Gaia's twin telescopes and a billion-pixel camera, the largest ever put into space.

The resolution is sharp enough to gauge the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometres, said Anthony Brown, head of the Gaia data processing and analysis team.

Gaia maps the position of the Milky Way's stars in a couple of ways. Not only does it pinpoint their location, the probe -- by scanning each star multiple times -- can plot their movement as well.

The data released on Wednesday included both kinds of data for some two million stars.

Over the course of Gaia's five-year mission, that catalogue is set to expand 500-fold.

Orbiting the Sun 1.5 million kilometres beyond Earth's orbit, the European probe started collected data in July 2014.

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