A few days ago (Monday to be exact), the Gaia telescope released its latest data to astronomers around the world, and already there are tons of papers being written and shared about the new results.

But what is Gaia and why are astronomers so excited?

Gaia is a space telescope that we've talked about briefly before in our telescope series. This telescope was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013 with an ambitious goal: create the largest, most precise map of the Milky Way ever.

It does this by measuring with extreme precision the position and motion of stars across the sky, as well as distance using a technique known as parallax.

You can try this technique yourself: hold out your thumb in front of you and close one eye.

Now, switch which eye is closed. You should notice that the background behind your thumb has moved - this is because your eyes are separated by a small amount, and they see the thumb at a different angle with respect to the background.

This is how astronomers and, in turn Gaia, measure distance - they look at a star and measure its position with respect to some background stars.

Then, half a year later when the Earth is on the other side of the Earth, they make another measurement.

The star will likely have moved with respect to the stars behind it and, through trigonometry (yes we do use it), we can calculate the distance.

Of course, the further away a star is, the less it will move, so we can only use this method to measure the distance to our local neighbourhood. But Gaia is stretching these measurements to further and more amazing limits.

So, what happened on Monday? Well, as Gaia has been toiling away hard, looking at stars, the astronomers assisting the mission have been hard at work analysing the raw data and converting it into a form that's easier to use.

As time goes on, the data becomes better and better (as Gaia stares at more stars for longer), and so the catalogue is updated with a bigger and better collection of stars.

When the update happens, it's called a "data release" and the third major one dropped on Monday.

This data release has positions, distances and brightnesses for 1.5 billion stars, as well as object classifications for 4.8 million galaxy candidates, 6.6 million quasar candidates (extremely bright centres of galaxies containing a super-massive black hole) and 800,000 non-single stars.

This last statistic is one that is particularly exciting.

These are stars where their motions indicate the presence of another object orbiting around them, which could be another star or even a planet!

If it is found that these are planets, then this will be one of the first times a planet has been found by staring at a star for a long period of time and seeing that the star's motion across the sky (ignoring the Earth's rotation) can only be explained by a planet orbiting around it.

So raise a glass for the wonderful work of Gaia, and spare a thought for all the astronomers frantically trying to scour the data for new and wonderful discoveries! Check out more about Gaia at cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia.