unknownskywalker:Milky Way image reveals detail of a billion…





unknownskywalker:

Milky Way image reveals detail of a billion stars

More than one billion stars in the Milky Way can be seen together in detail for the first time in an image captured by an international team of astronomers using infrared images from telescopes in the northern and southern hemispheres. Large structures of the Milky Way galaxy, such as gas and dust clouds where stars have formed and died, can be seen in the image.

The image shows the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which is often described as looking like two fried eggs back-to-back, with a flat disc in the middle. Earth is close to the edge of this disc, and the image shows a cross-section through the disc as seen from Earth’s perspective.

It combines data from the UKIDSS sky survey taken by the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii with the VVV survey from the VISTA telescope in Chile. Astronomers used infrared radiation instead of visible light to enable them to see through much of the dust in the Milky Way and record details of the centre of the galaxy.

Scientists have published the image online with an interactive zoom tool that reveals the detail within. Zooming into the image reveals a tiny fraction of the entire picture, which alone contains more than 10,000 stars.