The Millennium Star Atlas, also being called the first ever A-Z of the universe, has been published.

The guide charts the exact location and size of more than a million stars that can be seen from Earth.

The publication is causing some astronomers to rethink their ideas about our galaxy and others.

Turn left at the squiggle: the chart took 30 years to produce

Astronomers use the stars as a guide to find and look at planets. But the new data shows many past assumptions about where they are located are incorrect.

Most previous star charts are hundreds of years old. The European Space Agency has spent the past 30 years working on the Millennium Star Atlas project to provide a definitive guide.

The project made it from the theoretical to practical stage in 1989 when the agency launched a spacecraft to map the celestial sphere.

The satellite observed the stars by spinning in a fixed spot

Locked into a fixed position, the satellite rotated as it took pictures of everything visible from the Earth's position in space.

Eight years later, enough information had been collected to complete the ultimate hitch-hikers' guide to the universe.

Astronomer Carl Murray said: "The most fundamental part of astronomy is to figure out where the stars are.

"For thousands of years people have been producing catalogues of star positions because you measure everything else with relation to the position of background stars."

The major benefit for the European Space Agency at the end of almost a third of a century is that it can program its spacecrafts with more accurate co-ordinates.

Mr Murray added: "We will get better orbits for these moons, it will enable us to target the spacecraft more accurately and we will make sure we get the observations that we want."

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