Our galaxy, in full detail. A team of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has published a new image of the Milky Way: it is the most detailed, sharp and spectacular map that we have ever seen and it is part of the project called ATLASGAL ( Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy) .
The gigantic photograph covers the galactic plane visible from the southern hemisphere in an area of the sky 140 degrees long and 3 degrees wide, and includes most of the star-forming regions of our Milky Way.
The new map, four times larger than the previous version, also has a higher quality, since in some regions the observation was repeated in order to obtain a more uniform quality of the data within the total study area.
The instrument used for this complete map has been the APEX telescope (A tacama Pathfinder Experiment ), located in the Atacama desert, in northern Chile. APEX has a 12-meter diameter mirror at 5,100 meters above sea level , a quality that allowed the study of the cold universe (dust, gas …) at sub-millimeter wavelengths and with an unusual level of detail than other recent surveys. (which has even allowed the complete census of cold and massive clouds where new stars are forming).
Here you can access the full version of the map of the Milky Way.
