Check out the fascinating images of the central bulge of the Milky Way available in 50,000 x 25,000 pixels.
During the clear and especially moonless nights of July, August, and September, a milky-white stripe surrounds the sky and catches the eye of those that love watching the night sky. It flows like a river in the sky. In places, it “flows” calmly, in a narrow trough, and suddenly “spills” and expands. At one point, it splits into two arms, which merge again into a wide, milky white river that “flows” across the celestial sphere. This is the Milky Way. In the universe, stars and diffuse nebulae (light and dark) form giant star systems called galaxies. The Milky Way is our galaxy, where our solar system is also located, along with another 200 billion stars and planets, thousands of star clusters, and nebulae. The Milky Way is a giant spiral galaxy with a mass of between 750 billion and 1 trillion solar masses, about 100,000 light-years in diameter, and just 1,000 light-years thick. The stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky belong to the Milky Way. The existence of the Milky Way in the celestial sphere is because the distant stars of our Galaxy cannot be seen with the naked eye individually. Therefore this milky white stripe is obtained, which surrounds the entire celestial sphere. However, by looking through a telescope, you will see that the “clouds” of the Milky Way are formed by individual stars.
To get a clearer idea of the Milky Way’s size and the incredible number of stars in it, you can look at the photos below, published just a few days ago.
Latest Survey of Milky Way & The Images
It is amazing how much we learn about the universe with each passing year. Look at the previous months of September and October – dozens of groundbreaking discoveries about our Solar System. While the following photos are not what we normally call a discovery, they are astonishingly detailed. Revealed by a team of astronomers, they surveyed the Milky Way’s central bulge. What they examined were more than 250 million stars through their light fingerprint. What’s important is that they were also able to construct a massive color-composite view by using the stars’ near-ultraviolet, near-infrared, and optical light. This image measures 50,000 x 25,000 pixels, and a zoomable version is also available here. By far, this has to be the most detailed image of the Milky Way, or at least, I cannot recall seeing a better one.
This survey’s success became possible through using the Dark Energy Matter Camera (DECam) mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-m telescope. Out of the 250 million stars they captured, astronomers focused on 70,000 whose chemical composition they could analyze. They found that the ones closer to the center of the Milky Way had a strikingly similar composition, meaning they must have an identical origin, i.e., the same age and materials.
The results of this survey were formulated into two consecutive reports that you can read here (1) and here (2).
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