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ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way
Astronomers have published a gigantic infrared map of the Milky Way containing more than 1.5 billion objects ― the most detailed one ever made. Using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, the team monitored the central regions of our Galaxy over more than 13 years. At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.
“ 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 gigantic dataset[1] covers an area of the sky equivalent to 8600 full moons, and contains about 10 times more objects than a previous map released by the same team back in 2012. This research was presented in a paper entitled “The VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea eXtended (VVVX) ESO public survey: Completion of the observations and legacy” published in Astronomy & Astrophysics( https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450584).
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