British-built telescopes create Milky Way image of a billion stars
More than one billion stars across the Milky Way can be seen together in detail for the first time in a near-infrared image. Scientists created the colour picture by combining images from two sky surveys conducted by University of Hertfordshire researchers using British-built telescopes. The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii covered the northern part of the Milky Way and the VISTA telescope in Chile covered the southern part.
Many structures of our Milky Way spiral galaxy, such as star clusters and gas and dust clouds where new stars are forming, can be seen in the image. The near-infrared light from all these stars easily pierces the clouds that hide many of them from view in visible light. The image includes stars all the way over on the far side of the galaxy beyond the central bulge.
The UKIRT study (the UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey) was led by the University of Hertfordshire, while the VISTA study (VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea, or VVV) was co-led by astronomers in Chile and at the University of Hertfordshire. The picture itself was put together by the survey archive team at the University of Edinburgh.
Dr Phil Lucas from the University of Hertfordshire leads the UKIRT study of the Milky Way, and co-leads the VISTA study. He said: “The combined data on over a billion stars represent a scientific legacy that will be exploited for decades in many different ways. They provide a three-dimensional view of the structure of our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, while also mapping several hundred nebulae where stars are being born. The ongoing VISTA survey, in particular, is breaking new ground by showing how several hundred million stars vary in brightness over time."
The picture represents part of a 10-year project involving many scientists from numerous universities in the UK, Europe and Chile, who gathered data from the two telescopes. Chile is becoming a major scientific nation, now that many of the world's largest telescopes are sited in the Chilean Andes. The information has been processed and archived by teams at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, who have made it available to astronomers around the world for further studies.
The image is being presented at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester today (Thursday 29 March). It shows the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which is often described as looking like two fried eggs back-to-back, with a bulge in the middle. The solar system is close to the edge of this disc, and the image shows a cross-section through the disc as seen from Earth’s perspective. The colours in the image are derived from 3 different wavelengths of near-infrared light, just as normal colours are derived from combinations of the blue, green and red primary colours. The infrared colours used here have wavelengths about three times longer than blue, red and green.
Scientists have published the image online with an interactive zoom tool that reveals the detail within. Zooming into the image reveals a tiny fraction of the entire picture, which alone contains more than 10,000 stars.
The work was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The VISTA telescope is owned and operated by the European Southern Observatory.
ENDS
More details are available at
www.ph.ed.ac.uk/news/milky-way-image-reveals-detail-billion-stars-27-03-12
Images are available as follows, please credit Mike Read (WFAU), UKIDSS/GPS and VVV.
Full billion-star image:
http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/vvv_gps.tif (304 MB 39300x3750 pixels)
http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/vvv_gps_2.tif (27MB 19650x1875)
http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/vvv_gps_2.jpg(14 MB 19650x1875)
Interactive version:
http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/iipmooviewer-2.0-beta/vvvgps5.html
Shot of the star-forming area known as G305 in the Milky Way:
http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/subimages/b305_3_box.jpg
Detail of the star-forming area known as G305 in the Milky Way (white box outlined in image above):
http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/subimages/b305_0.jpg
For more information, please contact Julie Cooper, University of Hertfordshire Press Office on 01707 284095, Email: j.cooper5@herts.ac.uk
Notes to Editor
About the University of Hertfordshire
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