Gaia

A Journey of Discovery Through a Highly Dynamic Universe

About the Gaia ProjectNothing in the sky stands still: stars travel through the Milky Way, asteroids orbit the Sun, some stars dance around invisible black holes, and entire galaxies move through space. For more than ten years, the European Gaia Project has been measuring these movements; data collection is now complete. Using the collected data, we can now determine how far away stars are from us and track their so-called proper motion—the minimal but measurable shift with which stars move across the sky over the years. These movements reveal where stars, asteroids, and entire star systems come from and how they evolve.Live Event on December 2, 2026For the upcoming fourth major release of Gaia data , five and a half years of observations were analyzed—more than twice as many as last time. The result: a star catalog ten times larger than its predecessor, containing measurements for around two billion celestial objects—in part because, for the first time, not only the averaged final results but also the individual measurements for each celestial body are being published. On December 2, 2026, at 3:00 p.m., scientists from the European Gaia Consortium at the institutes in Heidelberg, Dresden, and Potsdam invite you to the Zeiss Grand Planetarium to share this journey of discovery with you—with an accessible introduction to this extraordinarily successful mission and selected highlights from the new data, presented in the planetarium’s dome. On the same day, similar events will take place at other locations across Europe, and one of the German contributions will be presented in more detail during a live broadcast to ESA . Afterward, you’ll have the opportunity to talk with the researchers in the foyer.Tickets: Free tickets can be reserved in advance via and picked up at the box office at the Zeiss Großplanetarium before the event. Alternatively, tickets can be reserved directly at the box office. Image © NASATranslated with DeepL

Meeting point: Zeiss-Großplanetarium | Planetarium

Next date:

• Date Wednesday, 02/December/2026 15:00 bis 16:40
• Venue Zeiss-Großplanetarium
• Address Prenzlauer Allee 80, 10405 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg