A new catalogue of the northern part of the visible Milky Way includes a whopping 219 million stars.
To create this catalogue Geert Barentsen of the University of Hertfordshire led a team who worked with the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT)in the Canary Islands for a decade, the Royal Astronomical Society reported.
To researchers the Milky Way appears as a glowing band stretching across the sky, believed to be the "disc" of our own galaxy. This disc contains the majority of the galaxy's stars, including our own Sun.
Individual objects in this region of the sky are difficult to distinguish with the unaided human eye, but the INT mirror allowed scientists to distinguish and chart about 219 million stars. The telescope proved to be able to see every star brighter than 20th magnitude, or one million times fainter than can be seen by the human eye.
Using the catalogue the researchers also created an extremely detailed map outlining the disc of the galaxy that shows how the density of stars varies, providing new insight into the structure of the system and its stars, gas, and dust.
The image show above is a cutout from a stellar density map taken directly from the released catalogue and reveals the newly-obtained view. Maps such as these could help create modern models of the Milky Way. This stellar density map is taken from the longest (reddest) wavelength band in which the dust's darkening effects is moderated in a way that highlights the structural detail.
"The production of the catalogue, IPHAS DR2 (the second data release from the survey [program] The INT Photometric H-alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane, IPHAS), is an example of modern astronomy's exploitation of 'big data'. It contains information on 219 million detected objects, each of which is [summarized] in 99 different attributes," the Royal Astronomical Society reported.