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.
A ripple in the outskirts of the Milky Way led Rochester Institute of Technology astrophysicist Sukanya Chakrabarti to a previously undetected dwarf galaxy hidden under a veil of dark matter. Now Chakrabarti is refining her technique to uncover dwarf galaxies and understand dark matter by simulating the evolutionary histories of galactic discs and their satellite populations.
In this image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), light from blazing blue stars energises the gas left over from the stars’ recent formation. The result is a strikingly colourful emission nebula, called LHA 120-N55, in which the stars are adorned with a mantle of glowing gas. LHA 120-N55 lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
An international team of astronomers has discovered a massive galaxy that consists of 99.99 percent dark matter. Even though it is relatively nearby, astronomers had missed the galaxy, named Dragonfly 44, for decades because it is very dim. The galaxy lies about 300 million light-years away in the constellation Coma.
