By Ron Cowen
Astronomers have unveiled a 180-foot-long poster showing the sharpest most detailed infrared view ever recorded of stars and dust in the inner Milky Way. To complete the portrait, researchers stitched together more than 800,000 infrared images taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, covering a swath of sky 120 degrees across and one degree above and below the plane of our dusty, disk-shaped galaxy.
The Spitzer mosaic is expected to be the gold standard for studying the inner region of the galaxy for years to come, notes Barbara Whitney of the Space Science Institute in Madison, Wis. Because Earth resides inside the Milky Way’s dusty disk, the view of the inner galaxy is blocked in visible light, but it can be penetrated by infrared detectors.
The poster was presented in St. Louis at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society.