This is a zoomed-in section of the 46 billion-pixel Milky Way picture depicting the Eta Carinae Nebula. An online tool provided by astronomers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) permits users to navigate the huge image by named object or celestial coordinates, zoom in or out, or apply specific filters. Image credit: Lehrstuhl für Astrophysik, RUB. AN screen capture by Ade Ashford.For five years, the astronomers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have been monitoring our galaxy in the search of objects with variable brightness. Those objects may, for example, include stars in front of which a planet is passing, or multiple systems where stars orbit each other and which obscure each other every now and then. In his PhD thesis, Moritz Hackstein is compiling a catalogue of such variable objects of medium brightness. For this purpose, the team from the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy takes pictures of the southern sky night after night. To this end, they use the telescopes at Bochum’s university observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile. More than 50,000 new variable objects, which had hitherto not been recorded in databanks, have been discovered by the researchers so far.
268 Individual Images Make Up the Photo of the Milky Way
The area that the astronomers observe is so large that they have to subdivide it into 268 sections. They photograph each section in intervals of several days. By comparing the images, they are able to identify the variable objects. The team has assembled the individual images of the 268 sections into one comprehensive image. Following a calculation period of several weeks, they created a 194 Gigabyte file, into which images taken with different filters have been entered.
Online Tool Facilitates Search for Individual Celestial Objects
Using the online tool, any interested person can view the complete ribbon of the Milky Way at a glance, or zoom in and inspect specific areas. An input window, which provides the position of the displayed image section, can be used to search for specific objects. If the user types in “Eta Carinae,” for example, the tool moves to the respective star; the search term “M8” leads to the Lagoon Nebula.
About 250 million light-years away, there’s a neighbourhood of our universe that astronomers had considered quiet and unremarkable. But now, scientists have uncovered an enormous, bizarre galaxy possibly formed from the parts of other galaxies. Some 718,000 light-years across, UGC 1382 is more than seven times wider than the Milky Way.
Many galaxies blast huge, wide-angled flows of material outward from their centres, pushing to their outer edges enough dust and gas each year that otherwise would have formed more than a thousand stars the size of our Sun. A team led by University of Maryland scientists has found the driving force behind these massive molecular outflows.
Zooming in on black holes is the main mission for the newly installed GRAVITY instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. During its first observations, GRAVITY successfully combined starlight using all four 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes. The first observations using GRAVITY with the four 8-metre VLT Unit Telescopes are planned for later in 2016.
