NASA Releases Millions of Infrared Images of Milky Way

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have put together two million infrared images of Milky Way from the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope to create a 360-degree portrait of it

 

In 2003, NASA sent the Spitzer Space Telescope in the space to take pictures of the Galaxy enclosing our planet. After about a decade, it has already taken millions of pictures that will show us how our galaxy looks like.

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. When we look to the core of it, which can only be done using of infrared light, we will see a crowded and dusty region filled with starts. 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.” But since that would be unachievable, they have created a digital viewer that anyone can look at.

The mosaic, which is 20 gigapixels big, uses Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope visualization platform. It shows more than 50 percent of all the stars in the galaxy because it focuses on a band were the plane of the Milky Way is situated. It shows an exceptional view of the plane of the Milky Way.

“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, is presented Friday in the TED conference in Vancouver.

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