Panorama of the Milky Way

NASA has published an interactive mosaic of infrared images of the Milky Way. This is the most clear and bright panorama, which ever managed to get.

The scalable image consists of more than 2 million photographs taken with the Spitzer space telescope over the past ten years. NASA image specialist Robert Hurth says: “If we wanted to print this panorama, we would need a billboard the size of a stadium with 100'000 seats.” And even with such a panorama, it is still only 3% of our night sky. But given that the Milky Way is disk-shaped, in these 3% we see most of the stars in this galaxy.







The Galactic Legacy Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire project, briefly GLIMPSE360, allows viewers to see the stars hidden behind cosmic dust. Our galaxy is a flat spiral disk; our solar system is in the outer third of the Milky Way, in one of the spiral arms. When we look toward the center of our galaxy, we see a crowded, dusty region chock full of stars. Due to the abundant amount of cosmic dust, ordinary telescopes do not see what is there, therefore, Spitzer with its infrared camera, the light of which passes through such interferences, was used for this study.

One of the project managers for GLIMPSE360, Ed Churchwell, added : “Spitzer helps us determine where the end of the galaxy is. We map the location of the spiral arms on the map, and we trace the shape of the galaxy. ” The project allowed scientists to collect the most accurate map of the center of our galaxy.

')





According to a press release posted on the Spitzer Space Telescope website, researchers have already learned that the Milky Way is more than we thought. The galaxy is “permeated with bubbles” - cavities emitting radiation and wind. The data allows scientists to build a more global model of stars and the formation of stars in the galaxy, which is called the “impulse” of the Milky Way.



Panorama from Spitzer.



Additional useful materials:

1. About Spitzer technologies .

2. The Milky Way Project - help scientists in the detailed examination of tens of thousands of infrared images of Spitzer.

3. Zooniverse is a group of online civil science projects (including The Milky Way Project), where volunteers help process the huge amounts of data scientists have to face.

4. DIY: English manual for creating a paper model of the Spitzer telescope.

5. DIY: English manual for creating a paper model of the Delta II launch vehicle with which Spitzer was launched.

6. Astronautics at Filegiver.

7. Computer 3D model of Spitzer.

8. Spitzer team blog.