Researchers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to put together a 360-degree portrait of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The image was made with over 2 million infrared pictures of the galaxy taken by the telescope over the last 10 years, marking the first time the pictures were put together into one, large view, according to JPL.
"If we actually printed this out, we'd need a billboard as big as the Rose Bowl Stadium to display it," said Robert Hurt, an imaging specialist at NASA's Spitzer Space Center. "Instead, we've created a digital viewer that anyone, even astronomers, can use."
Edward Churchwell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of astronomy, worked with a group of researchers to assemble the image, which was revealed on Thursday at a TED conference in Vancouver, Nature World News reported.
"For the first time, we can actually measure the large-scale structure of the galaxy using stars rather than gas," Churchwell said. "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."
Spitzer was launched in 2003 and has since been examining asteroids in our solar system as well as remote galaxies at the end of the universe, JPL reported. In the past decade, the telescope has spent 4,142 hours (172 days) capturing images of the plane of the Milky Way in infrared light. While visible light can't be used to look into the dusty center of the galaxy, infrared light is able to move through the dust and lets Spitzer look past the galaxy's center.
"Spitzer is helping us determine where the edge of the galaxy lies," Churchwell said. "We are mapping the placement of the spiral arms and tracing the shape of the galaxy."
The view shows new details about the galaxy's structure, with scientists having already discovered over 200 million objects in the galaxy, Nature World News reported.
"This gives us some idea about the general distribution of stars in our galaxy, and stars, of course make up a major component of the baryonic mass of the Milky Way," Churchwell said. "That's where the ballgame is."
