Do the stars gaze back?

On this day, in 2013, Gaia spacecraft was launched. This European Space Agency’s mission will make the largest, more precise three-dimensional map of our galaxy, the Milky Way, by charting the positions, distances, movements and changes in brightness of more than a billion stars. It’s observing plan is expected to enable the discovery of thousands of asteroids in the Solar System, and the discovery in our galactic neighbourhood of thousands of exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) and brown dwarfs (bodies with mass within that of a giant planet and the mass of a “cold” star).

Stardust (1999)

Neil Gaiman

"Stardust" is a fantasy novel written by British writer Neil Gaiman and published in 1999. The story follows the adventures of a young man from the village of Wall, on the borders of a magical land called Faerie.

A philosopher once asked,

“Are we human because we gaze at the stars,
or do we gaze at them because we are human?”