Hold Your Breath: The Most Detailed Catalogue of Visible Milky Way Contains 219 Million Stars Every time we gaze to the sky, we are looking at the Milky Way Galaxy. All the stars that we see - except one, which is the Andromeda galaxy, located in the Andromeda constellation - are part of the Galaxy which is home to our planet in the whole Universe. Earth, along with the Solar System, is situated in the Milky Way galaxy, orbiting about 28,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. A new study suggests that the disk of our own Galaxy, seen edge-on from our vantage point orbiting the Sun, contains the majority of the stars in the galaxy, including the Sun, and the densest concentrations of dust and gas. The unaided human eye struggles to distinguish individual objects in this crowded region of the sky, but with help from the Isaac Newton Telescope, astronomers were alble chart all stars brighter than 20th magnitude – or 1 million times fainter than can be seen with the human eye. The catalogue was assembled based on a full decade of observations. The image below is a small subsection of the full map. Click here to get a better look: ras.org.uk/images/stories/press/iphas-imap-copper-sqrt.png According to a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (arXiv.org preprint), the catalogue contains information on 219 million detected objects, each of which is summarized in 99 different attributes. Using the catalogue, the scientists have put together an extraordinarily detailed map of the disk of the Galaxy that shows how the density of stars varies.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 13:37:34 +0000
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