Star Formation | How stars are made? | Milky way Galaxy | Gaia | New 3-D map of Milky Way will ‘revolutionise astronomy’ | 3D map of Milky way Galaxy shows 1.7 billion stars

Star formation

Process by which dense regions within molecular clouds in interstellar space, sometimes referred to as "stellar nurseries" or "star-forming regions", collapse and form stars. As a branch of astronomy, star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium (ISM) and giant molecular clouds (GMC) as precursors to the star formation process, and the study of protostars and young stellar objects as its immediate products. It is closely related to planet formation, another branch of astronomy. Star formation theory, as well as accounting for the formation of a single star, must also account for the statistics of binary stars and the initial mass function.
Milky Way
is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. The descriptive "milky" is derived from the appearance from Earth of the galaxy – a band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term Milky Way is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek (galaxías kýklos, "milky circle"). From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within

Milky Way/Stars 25,000 crores ± 15,000 crores

Gaia is a space observatory of the European Space Agency designed for astrometry: measuring the positions and distances of stars with unprecedented precision.

EUROPE’S Gaia satellite has produced a 3-D map, of more than a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy ,complete with their distance from Earth, colour, and motion through space.

This image provided by the European Space Agency ESA, is Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. The map shows the total brightness and colour of stars observed by the ESA satellite in each portion of the sky between July 2014 and May 2016.Source:AP

The new, improved map depicts 1.7 billion stars “for which we can tell where they are in the sky with very high accuracy, and how bright they are,” said Anthony Brown of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium.

For 1.3 billion of those, “we know their distance and we know how they move through space.”