BREATHTAKING new images of the Milky Way have been been revealed as part of what scientists say is the most detailed infrared map ever made.
The map is made up of roughly 200,000 images, taken over the last 13 years, that have been laid on top of each other.
The images, captured by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) VISTA telescope, have given scientists a more accurate 3D view of the inner regions of the Milky Way.
These regions were previously hidden by heavy interstellar dust, which is responsible for the dark patches we can see within the mass of stars in the night sky.
The published images are just snapshots of a wider map containing more than 1.5billion cosmic objects.
That is roughly 10 times more celestial articles than the ESO's previous map published in 2012.
The ESO is an intergovernmental research organisation made up of 16 member states for ground-based astronomy, including the UK.
This gigantic dataset, made up of 500 terabytes of data, covers an area of the sky equivalent to 8,600 full moons.
For context, 500 terabytes of data is the equivalent of over 40 years worth of video, or 166million songs.
It is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.
“We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever,” Dante Minniti, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile who led the overall project, said in a statement.
After peering through the dust and gas, scientists were able to see radiation from the Milky Way’s most hidden corners.
The team have spotted newborn stars, which are often wrapped up in dusty cocoons away from view, as well as globular clusters.
Globular clusters are tightly bound clusters of tens of thousands to millions of stars, and host some of the oldest stars in the galaxy.
Many objects in the universe are too cold and faint to be detected in visible light.
However, they can be detected in the infrared.
The VISTA telescope can see infrared light, meaning it can also spot brown dwarfs, which are much smaller and colder than normal stars.
Free-floating planets without a star to orbit can be picked up by the telescope, based at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, too.
Researchers also tracked hypervelocity stars - runaway stars that travel 1.5milliom-miles-per-hour after interacting with a supermassive black hole.
