Milky Way mapped in 46 billion pixels!

The researchers discovered over 50,000 new objects with varying levels of brightness. These variable objects could be “stars in front of which a planet is passing, or stellar systems in which stars obscure each others brightness in orbit”. The picture took five years to make, as it needed an huge amount of data to be put in it. Astronomers needed to gather all that data before they could make the actual deep space picture and release it to the public.

The RUB observatory’s telescopes might not be as powerful as the European “Very Large Telescope” observatory on Cerro Paranal, but Rolf Chini, the director of the RUB observatory, says they are more effective because RUB astronomers don’t have to fight for gazing time.

Recently, the team of astronomers compiled images of each section into a one massive photo of the Milky Way galaxy.

The researchers have provided an online tool where the public could see the entire Milky Way just by merely looking at their work.

The region that the researchers are monitoring is so large that it had to be divided into 268 sections.

To be able to stitch every image together the finished image took weeks of calculations in order to remove and identify any variables between each image. It’s now the biggest astronomical picture of all time, and it shows the Milky Way Galaxy in 194 gigabyte file size. If the user types in “Eta Carinae”, for example, the tool moves to the respective star; the search term “M8” leads to the Lagoon Nebula.

“Using the online tool, any interested person can view the complete ribbon of the Milky Way at a glance, or zoom in and inspect specific areas”, the university statement said. There is an input window that provides the displayed image section to search for a specific object.