The image below shows a breathtaking view of the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as seen by the VISTA telescope from the European Space Agency. With the naked eye, you’d probably see the center of the Milky Way—with countless stars and cosmic dust clouds—occupying a small patch of a few inches.
However, thanks to the
VISTA telescope we got one of the most detail portraits of the Milky Way EVER
produced which has allowed astronomers to catalog a staggering 84 million
stars. After seeing this image, ask yourself. Are we alone in the Milky Way?
The above image is just a small, reduced—thumbanil version of the original
image which has a mind-boggling resolution of 108,500×81,500—or if you prefer 9
gigapixels, occupying 24.6 gigabytes.
If for some reason you
want to download the 24.6-gigabyte image you can do so by clicking here. Check
out the ENTIRE 9-gigapixel image—and zoom in on those stars—by clicking here.
This image is simply too big to be displayed at full resolution and is best appreciated
using the zoom tool.
In order to obtain this
image, ESO’s VISTA telescope—which stands for Visible and Infrared Survey
Telescope for Astronomy—snapped thousands of images of the sky after which
astronomers compiled them into one 9 gigapixel mosaic. The Vista telescope is
one of the LARGEST visible and near infrared telescopes on the planet, and it
just showed us how cool it really is which this mind-bending image.
The image you are
seeing is crystal clear because the VISTA telescope boasts a stunning infrared
camera which enables it to peer through the dust clouds that obscure the view
of other telescopes. In order to understand how powerful the VISTA telescope
really is, here below is a comparison between an image of the Milky Way—the
same image—as seen from an infrared telescope and a visible telescope.
Pretty amazing right?
Just imagine what else is out there? The Milky Way galaxy is really unique,
it’s beautiful and this image makes you love our cosmic home even more, right?
But this image wasn’t taken just for aesthetic purposes. In fact, this massive
image has allowed scientists and astronomers to identify numerous cosmic objects
in space that are worth researching further.
This image allowed
astronomers to identify 84 million stars in the Milky Way. Our cosmic home—the
Milky Way—is part of a supermassive structure interconnected by over 800
galaxies located at around 1000 million light years away. Our galaxy is part of
an intergalactic highway that stretches some 500 million light years across and
contains around 100,000,000,000,000,000 Suns, dubbed by scientists as Laniakea.
Oh and, just a fun fact
here, did you know that astronomers maintain that there are around 500 billion
galaxies in the known universe, which means there are around
50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×1022) habitable planets. Astronomers argue
that just inside our Milky Way Galaxy, there are some 400 BILLION STARS.
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