The Gaia space telescope launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) over a decade ago to map out our home galaxy was shut down on Thursday (March 27). Gaia, since its launch in 2013 has been instrumental in creating a vast map of the Milky Way, revealing many secrets and estimating its future.

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After starting to take observations on July 24, 2014 till the date it shut down, Gaia revealed massive galaxies slamming into each other, identified vast clusters of stars, and helped discover new exoplanets. It also played an important role in mapping millions of galaxies and blazing galactic monsters called quasars.

3 trillion observations

Close to 3 trillion observations of 2 billion stars and objects have been taken by Gaia over the last decade, which has helped 13,000 scientific publications.

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Originally named Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics, Gaia was conceived with the aim of mapping the cosmos, through accurate measurement of the location and movement of stars and other celestial bodies.

Tracked 150,000 asteroids

The telescope that also spotted more than 50 dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, tracked 150,000 asteroids and detected at least 33 black holes inside it made the observation from a stable orbit 1.5 million kilometres (932,000 miles) from Earth called the second Lagrange point, reported news agency AFP.

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However, the recent arrivals of the powerful James Webb and Euclid space telescopes forced ESA to shut down its space observatory mission Gaia.

Though Gaia has been removed from service, the "retirement orbit" will make sure it will remain at least 10 million kilometres from Earth for the next 100 years.

Meanwhile, scientists are gearing to deliver the fourth catalogue of the stars in 2026, based on the deluge of data sent by the telescope.