Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2024

50 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2024 The most detailed infrared map ever of our Milky Way by ESO − Bárbara Ferreira A stronomers have published a gigantic infrared map of the Milky Way containing more than 1.5 billion objects ― the most detailed one ever made. Using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, the teammonitored the central regions of our Galaxy over more than 13 years. At 500 tera- bytes of data, this is the largest ob- servational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope. “We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever,” says Dante Minniti, an astrophysicist at T his collage highlights a small selection of regions of the Milky Way imaged as part of the most detailed infrared map ever of our galaxy. Here we see, from left to right and top to bottom: NGC 3576, NGC 6357, Messier 17, NGC 6188, Messier 22 and NGC 3603. All of them are clouds of gas and dust where stars are forming, except Messier 22, which is a very dense group of old stars. The images were captured with ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and its infrared camera VIRCAM. The gigantic map to which these images belong contains 1.5 billion objects. The data were gathered over the course of 13 years as part of the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey and its companion project, the VVV eXtended survey (VVVX). [ESO/VVVX survey]