Grieving father tells of gagging law hurt
Revealed in astonishing, awe-inspiring detail for the first time, our ENTIRE galaxy containing billions of stars – and the breath taking place we call home
A FATHER whose three children died tragically has said he is hurt and angry by a gagging law that means they can’t be named.
The Court of Appeal ruled last month that dead children cannot be identified when someone is charged with killing them.
The grieving father told the Mail: ‘I need to celebrate their all-too-short lives... I cannot describe the hurt and anger I felt at the decision.’
Justice Minister Helen McEntee said yesterday that she plans to change the law ‘quickly’ so young victims can be named.
GAZE upon this image for just a few moments. When you realise what you are looking at, it will leave you speechless with wonderment and humility.
For this is the Milky Way as no human eye has seen it before.
Astronomers have produced the most detailed map of the place we call home, shedding light on a mindboggling 1.8billion stars. Even as recently as five years ago, we had a detailed understanding of only around 100,000 stars in our galaxy.
The incredibly precise, high-resolution 3D map from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory shows a side view of the entire visible universe, with the glowing galactic centre of the Milky Way at its heart.
Meticulous work by organisations including the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University has revealed the distance, motion and properties of around 1.7billion more stars than could previously be described.
Caroline Harper, of the UK Space Agency, said the Gaia map represents a ‘truly historic moment’, adding: ‘For thousands of years, we have been preoccupied with noting and detailing the stars and their precise locations as they expanded humanity’s understanding of our cosmos. Gaia has been staring at the heavens for the past seven years, mapping the positions and velocities of stars.
‘Thanks to its telescopes, we have in our possession today the most detailed billion-star 3D atlas ever assembled.’
Gaia carries two telescopes and one of the largest cameras in space, and is about 930,000 miles from Earth.
Astronomers can now work out the exact distance of stars from Earth and reveal their temperature – with hot supergiants shining a more blue light and cooler dwarf stars shining a more red light. And, just as traditional street lights shine yellow because they contain sodium, the colour of starlight can reveal metal-rich younger stars, in contrast to those from the dawn of time forged from simpler gases.
The results from Gaia are published in three separate papers within the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. We are, however, still some way off mapping the entire galaxy, with it containing an estimated 100billion to 400billion stars in total.
Dr Nicholas Walton, of the Institute of Astronomy, said: ‘We can tell you which stars are active, which ones are dormant, which ones are going to die, which ones are going to explode. Other missions can build on that and go in and focus on the detail.’
The researchers aim to use the information to learn more about the fate of the Milky Way by predicting how the galaxy will change in the future.