SPACE
ASTRONOMERS CAPTURE THE MOST DE TAILED MAP OF THE MILKY WAY
WORDS BEN TURNER Made
A selection of regions of the Milky Way imaged as part of the most detailed infrared map of our galaxy ever
Made using 13 years of observations across 420 nights, the new map charts more than 1.5 billion objects. The record-breaking map was stitched together from 200,000 images captured by the European
Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) in Chile. To make the map, astronomers used the VISTA InfraRed CAMera
(VIRCAM), which peered through the dust and gas permeating the Milky Way to discover radiation from previously unnoticed sources. This enabled the telescope to pick up the infrared glow from ‘failed stars’ – objects that straddle the line between giant planets and small stars that are also known as brown dwarfs – and gravitationally unbound rogue planets, on hundreds of nights between 2010 and 2023. Repeat observations made in each region of the sky also enabled the team to track how objects move and how they’ve changed over time.