It took University of Hertfordshire astronomers 10 year to do it , but their meticulous elbow grease have result in a mindboggingly detailed catalogue of the visible part of the northerly section of the Milky Way — a Brobdingnagian belt of place that check new few than 219 million stars .
Looking below , the axis vertebra show galactic parallel and longitude ( coordinates that relate to the position of the meat of the extragalactic nebula ) . The mapped data contain the enumeration of stars detected in i , the longer ( redder ) wavelength broad isthmus of the survey , down to a faint terminal point of 19th magnitude . This is just a small section of the full mathematical function , but it depict in recherche item the complex patterns of obscuration due to interstellar dust .
The astronomers used the Isaac Newton Telescope ( INT ) on La Palama in the Canary Islands to hoard the map . you’re able to find a higher closure imagehere , which I used to create this zoomed - in image showing a little portion of the map :
From the Royal Astronomical Society’spress release :
From dark sky web site on Earth , the Milky Way appears as a glow band stretching across the sky . To uranologist , it is the disk of our own galax , a system dilute across 100,000 light - years , seen boundary - on from our vantage point in time orbiting the Sun . The magnetic disk contains the majority of the stars in the galaxy , including the Sun , and the densest absorption of dust and natural gas .
The unaided human eye shinny to tell apart individual object in this crowded region of the sky , but the 2.5 - beat mirror of the INT enabled the scientists to resolve and graph 219 million separate stars . The INT programme chart all the stars brighter than twentieth magnitude – or 1 million times fainter than can be look with the human eye .
Using the catalog , the scientist have put together an extraordinarily elaborated map of the disk of the Galaxy that show how the density of star varies , grant them a new and vivid perceptivity into the structure of this Brobdingnagian system of stars , gas and dust .
The image included here , a cut of meat - out from a prima density map mine directly from the released catalog , illustrate the new view obtained . The Turner - like brush diagonal of debris shadows would grace the bulwark of any graphics gallery . Maps like these also stand as useful tests of new - generation model for the Milky Way .
The written report will appear in an upcoming edition ofThe Royal Astronomical Society .
AstronomyMilky WayScienceSpacestars
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