Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
A map of our galactic home – the Milky Way – has been produced containing more than 1.5 billion objects. This means it is 10 times more detailed than the previous most comprehensive Milky Way map.
More than 13 years of observations and 500 terabytes of data went into the map which is described in a paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
It uses more than 200,000 images taken by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA) operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The total area of sky encapsulated in the images is the same as about 8,600 full moons.
The international effort is the largest ever observational project conducted using any ESO telescope.
Mapping the Milky Way is a tricky business – not least of which because we are in it.
Much of the light from distant objects is masked by brighter stars. For example, cold object like brown dwarf stars and newborn stars shrouded in dusty cocoons often go unseen in observations at higher wavelengths like the visible spectrum.
These objects glow at lower wavelengths like infrared, however, piercing through and being picked up by infrared-wavelength telescopes.
Regions of the inner galaxy previously hidden by dust have been revealed in the new map.
“We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our galaxy forever,” says Dante Minniti, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile who led the project.
