Milky Way as you’ve never seen it before: One billion stars in one image

Scientists created the colour picture by combining infra-red light images from telescopes in the northern and southern hemispheres.

Large structures of the Milky Way, such as gas and dust clouds where stars have formed and died, can be seen in the image.

• The full Milky Way image

• A star-forming area in the Milky Way

The picture represents part of a ten-year project involving scientists from the UK, Europe and Chile, who gathered data from the two telescopes.

Teams at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge processed and archived the information, and have now made it available to astronomers around the world for further studies.

The image shows the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, which is often described as looking like two fried eggs back-to-back, with a flat disc in the middle. Earth is close to the edge of this disc, and the image shows a cross-section through the disc as seen from Earth’s perspective.

Scientists have published the image online with an interactive zoom tool that reveals the detail within. Zooming into the image reveals a tiny fraction of the entire picture, which alone contains more than 10,000 stars.

The work was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

The image is being presented at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester today.

Dr Nick Cross, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy, said: “This incredible image gives us a new perspective of our galaxy, and illustrates the far-reaching discoveries we can make from large sky surveys. Having data processed, archived and published by dedicated teams leaves other scientists free to concentrate on using the data, and is a very cost-effective way to do astronomy.”