The images were taken with ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA) in Chile and its VIRCAM infrared camera
The images were taken with ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA) and its infrared camera VIRCAM. The huge map to which these images belong contains 1.5 billion objects. The data was collected over 13 years as part of the VISTA Variants Survey Project for the Milky Way (VVV) and its companion project (VVVX).
The most detailed view of the Milky Way in infrared format published by astronomers, contains over 1.5 billion objects. Using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) VISTA telescope, the team has followed the central regions of our galaxy for more than 13 years. With 500 terabytes of data, it is the largest observational venture ever carried out with an ESO telescope.
"We made so many discoveries that we changed the way we look at our galaxy forever," says Dante Minitti, an astrophysicist at the Andres Bello University in Chile who headed the project.
This record-breaking map contains 200,000 images taken by ESO's VISTA telescope. Located at ESO's Fresnel Observatory in Chile, the telescope is primarily designed to map large areas of the sky. The team used VISTA's VIRCAM infrared camera, which can peer through the dust and gas that fills our galaxy. Thus she is able to see the radiation from the most hidden areas of our galaxy, and open a unique window into our galactic environment.
This huge database covers an area of the sky equal to 8600 full moons, and contains about ten times more objects than a previous map published by the same team in 2012. It includes new stars that are often shrouded in dust and globular clusters – dense groups of the oldest star masses in the Milky Way. Observations in infrared light allow VISTA to also locate very cold objects that shine at these wavelengths, such as brown dwarfs (stars that failed to produce nuclear fusion) or planets that float freely and do not revolve around a star.
The observations began in 2010, ended in the first half of 2023, and were spread over 420 nights. By observing each part of the sky multiple times, the team was able to not only determine the location of these objects, but also track their movement and if their brightness changes. They mapped stars whose brightness changes cyclically and can be used as cosmic rulers to measure distances, giving us a precise XNUMXD picture of the inner regions of the Milky Way, which were previously hidden by dust. The researchers also tracked super-velocity stars ejected from the central region of the Milky Way after a close encounter with the supermassive black hole that resides there.
The new map contains data collected as part of the Milky Way VISTA Variables (VVV) survey project and the companion project VVV eXtended (VVVX). "The project was a huge effort, made possible because we were surrounded by a great team," says Roberto Saito, an astrophysicist at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil and lead author of the paper published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics about the completion of the project.
The VVV and VVVX surveys have already led to more than 300 scientific papers. With the completion of the surveys, the continued scientific investigation of the collected data will continue for decades. Meanwhile, ESO's Fresnel Observatory is preparing for the future: the VISTA telescope will be upgraded with the new 4MOST instrument and ESO's VLT telescope will receive its MOONS instrument. Together, they will provide a spectrum of the millions of objects observed here, with many discoveries to look forward to.
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