The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have put together two million infrared images of Milky Way collected by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope to create a 360-degree portrait of it.
In 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST), an infrared space observatory, to take pictures of the Galaxy enclosing our planet. After about a decade, it has captured millions of images of the Milky Way galaxy.
The Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who compiled the images, described the Milky Way as a flat spiral disk. Taking a look at its core, which can only be done using of infrared light, a crowded and dusty region filled with stars can be seen. Our planet on the other hand, is situated in the outer one-third of the galaxy.
Imaging specialist Robert Hurt of the NASA Spitzer Space Science Center in Pasadena said in a press release, that they can "show it in a monitor or a billboard as big as the Rose Bowl Stadium to view it.” However, since the idea is unfeasible, they decided to use a digital viewer instead.
The mosaic, which is 20 gigapixels big, uses Microsoft WorldWide Telescope (WWT) computer program that shows the astronomical view of the sky in 3D format.. The image presented shows more than 50 percent of the stars in the galaxy because it focuses on a band where the Milky Way is situated giving us an exceptional view of the spiral galaxy.
“For the first time, we can actually measure the large-scale structure of the galaxy using stars rather than gas,” said Edward Churchwell, a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to Science 2.0. “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 new image of the Milky Way, which is named GLIMPSE360, was presented Friday in the TED conference in Vancouver.
