An incredibly clear panoramic view of the Milky Way has been created using more than two million images taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
If it were printed, the entire image would need to be displayed on a billboard the size of a stadium, the Daily Mail reported. Instead, the stunning views of our galaxy are available online.
Wisconsin scientists knit together the two million images to create "a dramatic 360-degree portrait of the Milky Way," said a University of Wisconsin, Madison news release.
UW-Madison astronomer Barb Whitney headed the team that compiled the picture, which is called "GLIMPSE360."
The researchers unveiled the composite portrait at a TED conference in Vancouver last week.
For the first time, we can actually measure the large-scale structure of the galaxy using stars rather than gas," Edward Churchwell, a UW-Madison professor of astronomy who worked on the project, said in the news release. "We've established beyond the shadow of a doubt that our galaxy has a large bar structure that extends halfway out to the sun's orbit. We know more about where the Milky Way's spiral arms are."
The Spitzer Space Telescope, which launched in 2003, has compiled a rich collection of space data to help scientists learn more about our galaxy.
The two million images examined by the Wisconsin researchers have revealed more than 200 million new items that can be listed in the Milky Way "catalog."
Besides showing existing objects, the panoramic view of the Milky Way will help scientists figure out when new stars will begin to burn.
"We can see every star-forming region in the plane of the galaxy," Robert Benjamin, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and a member of the GLIMPSE team, said in the news release.
"This gives us some idea of the metabolic rate of our galaxy," Whitney explained. "It tells us how many stars are forming each year."
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