Most complete map of the Milky Way is released – 09/30/2024 – Science
To expand knowledge about the Milky Way, a team of 146 researchers, including 14 Brazilians, spent more than ten years working on mapping our galaxy. The material is considered the most detailed ever produced.
The infrared map was made from 200,000 images captured over 13 years with the help of the VISTA telescope (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy), which is located at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in Chile. The team used VISTA’s VIRCAM infrared camera, which can peer through the dust and gas that permeate the galaxy.
“It is able to see radiation from the most hidden places in the Milky Way, thus opening a unique window into our galactic environment,” the researchers wrote in a note released by ESO.
The map can be accessed free of charge on the observatory portal.
The current map covers an equivalent area of the sky and 8,600 full moons and contains about 10 times more objects than the map created by researchers in 2012, two years after the project began. “It includes stars in formation, which are often hidden in dust cocoons, and globular clusters — dense groups of millions of stars among the oldest in the Milky Way,” the scientists point out in the observatory’s official statement.
VISTA is also capable of detecting objects such as brown dwarfs — “failed” stars that do not have enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion — and wandering planets, which do not orbit any stars.
There were 420 nights of sky observations in which the group recorded movements and changes in brightness of the most different objects. Cataloging the material can be used to measure distances to stars and allowed researchers to obtain an accurate 3D view of the inner regions of the Milky Way, which were hidden by dust. Scientists also tracked the hypervelocity stars, catapulted from the central region of the Milky Way after a close encounter with a nearby supermassive black hole.
The map and an article published by the researchers this year are part of the VISTA Variables in the Milky Way (VVV) project and the complementary project, the VVV eXtended (VVVX) study.
“This project represented a monumental effort, made possible thanks to a fantastic team,” said Roberto Saito, astrophysicist at UFSC (Federal University of Santa Catarina) and main author of the study published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The research has already resulted in more than 300 scientific articles over the years and, although the group’s studies are completed, scientific exploration of the data collected will continue for decades, according to experts. According to ESO, the VISTA telescope will be updated with new instruments to make even better records in the future.
