MAP OF THE MILKY WAY’S CENTRAL BULGE

 

It turns out that the center of our galaxy resembles the shape of a peanut.

UCLA’s R. Michael Rich is looking to map this dense inner region of the Milky Way. It can be thought of as a big metropolitan area with “stellar suburbs” of stars at the edges that can be anywhere from a few million years old to some 12 billion years old.

The way he plans to do this is to use images taken from a 500 megapixel camera - To put that in another way, an image taken from this camera would need 250 computer screens to view. So a supercomputer will then parse through that data and reduce the images for viewing.

Rich hopes to use this study to better understand how our galaxy has formed and evolved over time.

Know more:
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/dept/faculty/ucla-to-lead-nsf-funded-map-of-the-milky-ways-central-bulge

Reference:
http://www.eso.org/public/usa/news/eso1339/