A team used the European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope to create the most detailed infrared map of the universe, monitoring the galaxy for more than 13 years. The map comprises 500 terabytes of data, the ESO reports, inviting the public to check out its "gigantic dataset."
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 overall project.
This record-breaking map comprises 200 000 images taken by ESO's VISTA ― the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy. Located at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile, the telescope's main purpose is to map large areas of the sky. The team used VISTA's infrared camera VIRCAM, which can peer through the dust and gas that permeates our galaxy. It is therefore able to see the radiation from the Milky Way's most hidden places, opening a unique window onto our galactic surroundings.
Repeated scans of the same region generated the parralax data to estimate the distance and composition of each object.
By observing each patch of the sky many times, the team was able to not only determine the locations of these objects, but also track how they move and whether their brightness changes. They charted stars whose luminosity changes periodically that can be used as cosmic rulers for measuring distances . This has given us an accurate 3D view of the inner regions of the Milky Way, which were previously hidden by dust. The researchers also tracked hypervelocity stars — fast-moving stars catapulted from the central region of the Milky Way after a close encounter with the supermassive black hole lurking there.
Good luck trying to stitch it all into a JPG! "The dataset is too large to release as a single image, but the processed data and objects catalogue can be accessed in the ESO Science Portal."
Compare to the European Space Agency's 2016 map of the Milky Way, then also touted as the most detailed.
Previously:
• The Milky Way from Anza Borrego desert, a sky-stabilized timelapse
• NASA releases the music of the Milky Way as 'recorded' by space telescopes
• You are looking at 84 million stars in the heart of the Milky Way — how small do you feel now?
• Is the Milky Way a boneyard of long-dead civilizations?
