Imagine the sheer excitement of finishing a task that you’ve been working on for five years. That’s exactly what astronomers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, felt after completing their 46 billion pixel panoramic of the Milky way; yes, you heard right, 46 billion.
Of course, something that absurdly enormous encapsulates 194 gigabytes, making it impossible to view online in its native format, lest we were to wait days for it finish downloading. That’s obviously unpractical, so Dr. Rolf Chini from the Chair of Astrophysics created an online tool that condenses the image for us laymen (and women) in a visible format.
Astronomers from Bochum created the image by mapping the night sky into 268 separate sections, photographing each in intervals over several days before assembling everything into one inclusive image, a process that lasted several weeks.
The scope, according to Moritz Hackstein, the PhD student who orchestrated the endeavor, was to catalogue objects of variable brightness in the sky. By “objects of variable brightness,” Hackstein is referring to stars whose brightness is periodically obscured by planets orbiting in front of our line of sight, or binary stars that occasionally conceal each other.
While using the telescopes at Bochum's university observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the team cataloged 50,000 new variables objects that we previously unknown.
The resulting image can be viewed here. Curious readers will be treated to an interactive view of the entire Milky Way, or zoom in and examine a specific segments while an input window on the side keeps may be used to search for specific objects.
Source: Eurekalert
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