Astronomers all over the world have been surveying the sky for years now, even looking beyond our galaxy. Now, the Milky Way is seen in a dramatic new way in a mesmerizing new image produced by astronomers using the Apex observatory.
The Apex Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) project recorded the image of our home galaxy. Due to the unique nature of this instrument, astronomers recorded the presence of cold gas scattered throughout our Milky Way galaxy.
The Apex telescope is located on Chajnantor Plateau, 5,100 meters (16,700 feet) above sea level in Chile. It boasts a reflector 468 inches in diameter. Data from the massive ground-based telescope was pieced together with observations from the Planck space-based telescope, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).
"ATLASGAL provides exciting insights into where the next generation of high-mass stars and clusters form. By combining these with observations from Planck, we can now obtain a link to the large-scale structures of giant molecular clouds," said Timea Csengeri of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), located in Bonn, Germany.
From side to side, this new image covers 140 degrees in length, and 3 degrees across. This is nearly 1,700 times larger than the full moon as seen from Earth.
One instrument utilized in the Apex survey is the Large Bolometer Camera (LABOCA), an ultra-sensitive camera capable of recording a change of temperature in its detectors driven by cool bands of dust obscuring light from distant stars.
The Apex telescope has been in operation for just over a decade, complimenting the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma), also operating on the Chajnantor Plateau. Data gathered from the Apex observations of the southern half of our galaxy will be examined in greater detail by astronomers using the Alma observatory. This southern part of the galaxy includes the galactic core, making it a rich field of data for astronomers. The northern half of the Milky Way was mapped by researchers using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.
Frequencies of electromagnetic energy studied in the Apex observations sit between infrared and radio wavelengths. This is the second Atlasgal photograph released by astronomers, and data from the program has already spawned nearly 70 scientific articles published in journals. Future research will examine gas in the Milky Way using other instruments in an effort to view the galaxy in a variety of wavelengths.
"The new release of the full survey opens up the possibility to mine this marvellous dataset for new discoveries. Many teams of scientists are already using the ATLASGAL data to plan for detailed ALMA follow-up," said Leonardo Testi of the European Southern Observatory.
