New Milky Way map containing more than 1.5 billion objects set to 'change the view of our Galaxy forever'. Photo

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have published the largest infrared map of the Milky Way ever made, which contains more than 1.5 billion objects. The work lasted more than 13 years and contains more than 500 terabytes of data.

This project was the largest in the history of the European Observatory, as it contained more than 200,000 images taken by VISTA, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The researchers emphasize that the new map will "change the view of our Galaxy forever," LiveScience reports.

To create the most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way, astronomers used the VISTA InfraRed CAMera (VIRCAM), an infrared camera that searched through dust and gas to detect radiation from previously unseen sources.

This allowed the telescope to capture infrared glow from "failed stars" - objects that straddle the line between giant planets and small stars, also known as brown dwarfs - and gravitationally unbound rogue planets.

"We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever," said Dante Minniti, project leader, co-author of the study, and astrophysicist at the Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile.

According to the scientists, the resulting dataset is huge: it covers an area of sky equivalent to the width of 8,600 full moons and contains 10 times more objects than the map published by the same team of scientists in 2012.

Now that the project is complete, the researchers will be waiting for the upgrade to VISTA and the ESO Very Large Telescope. This will allow experts to split the incoming light into its component spectra so that researchers can better understand the chemical composition of the newly discovered objects.

Scientists emphasize that the collected dataset contains millions of objects that will allow for new discoveries over the years.

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