Photo of the largest Milky Way galaxy ever

At 46 billion pixels in size and 194 GB in size, this is a photograph of the Milky Way galaxy with the highest resolution that astronomers have ever taken. To create the photo, the group of astronomers at the Ruhr University - Bochum (RUB), Germany had to synthesize astronomical observations data for the past 5 years.

Due to the large capacity, up to 194GB, to see the image, the researchers made an online viewing tool (here). It can be said that this is almost the whole thing of the Milky Way that we can see from the Earth. The image shows an area of ​​1,323 square feet (Area in Square Degrees, similar to the angle of a circle measured in degrees, the cubic angle of a sphere measured in square degrees, the entire sphere is 41,253 square degrees, the full moon covers about 0.2 square degrees in the sky when viewed from Earth. This area is about 6,500 times larger than the full moon appearing in the sky.

Screenshot from the image viewing site.

To create the image, the team used the observatory in the Atacama desert, Chile, to stitch together multiple images of the night sky together. The image itself is divided into 268 parts. Compared to other spatial photographs, it seems that it is not very colorful. The reason is that scientists have used narrowband filter , accepting not to let many colors pass but in exchange, they can find many objects that fluctuate light easily. easy.

From this composite picture, the team was able to discover more than 50,000 transforming objects, including variable stars (variable stars, evenly or irregularly changing stars) . This may be because the star is passing by, going into orbit or being obscured by another star.