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Astronomers have actually produced the most comprehensive infrared map of the Galaxy — and it includes more than 1.5 billion things.
Used 13 years of observations throughout 420 nights, the brand-new map charts a large variety of stars, “failed” brown overshadows, free-floating worlds and hypervelocity suns released into area after close encounters with our galaxy’s main supermassive great void
The record-breaking map was sewn together from 200,000 images recorded by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) telescope in Chile. The scientists released their findings Sept. 26. in the journal Astronomy & & Astrophysics
“We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever,” task lead and research study co-author Dante Minnitian astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile, stated in a declaration
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To make the map, the astronomers utilized the VISTA InfraRed CAMera (VIRCAM), an infrared electronic camera which peered through the dust and gas penetrating the Galaxy to find radiation from formerly undetected sources.
This made it possible for the telescope to get the infrared radiance from “failed stars” — items that straddle the line in between huge worlds and little stars, likewise referred to as brown overshadows– and gravitationally unbound rogue worlds on numerous nights in between 2010 and 2023. Repeat observations made in each area of the sky likewise allowed the group to track how items move and how their brightnesses altered with time.
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The resulting dataset is huge: covering a location of sky equivalent to the width of 8600 moons and consisting of about 10 times more things than the map the exact same group launched in 2012. Now that it has actually been finished, the scientists will wait for upgrades to VISTA and ESO’s Very Large Telescope that will allow them to break inbound light down into its part spectra so that they can much better comprehend the chemical structures of the freshly found things.
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