ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way

Part of this dataset (VVV actually) can be explored interactively here:

https://alasky.cds.unistra.fr/VISTA/VVV_DR4/VISTA-VVV-DR4-Co...

>“We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever"

>The VVV and VVVX surveys have already led to more than 300 scientific articles.

While they do say what objects the survey included, the article seems to lack many examples of discoveries.

For those following this what do you consider the greatest discoveries and highlights?

an amazing 3d map implementation of the taken images here: https://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home

Very cool! A lot of my professors in the credits. Roberto Saito was the one who taught me Maxwell's Laws :-)

Some sort of 3D visualization of this dataset would be very, very nice.

This is of course hard ... the distance (3rd number) is not one that is very precise.

But still, I always have a hard time picturing what our galaxy looks like when looking at 2D pics.

> This gigantic dataset covers an area of the sky equivalent to 8600 full moons

What proportion of the celestial vault or sphere is that? Napkin calcul appreciated :)

Is it detailed enough for a realistic space flight sim?

Is there also a tracking of temporary vannishing and reappearance of objects.. as in can i have the error map that is a object tracking in the kuiper.

still hoping for space .ycombinator .com (and/or spacetime.)

someday

the search engine unfortunately does not appear to properly support multiple keywords with AND/OR logic

If this telescope can detect planets not orbiting a star, I wonder if it could improve detection of some planets orbiting stars as well.

This is likely around less than 1% of the Milky Way using stars mapped as a calculation

Isn't it unrealistic, combining months of data together with unseen light wavelengths(giving every wavelength different colour for aesthetic). Someone need to capture earth like that.

Fun fact. The estimated number of stars in the Milky Way (~2e11-4e11) is within an order of magnitude of the estimated number of individual particles of smoke in a cigarette (~1e12).

Am I the only one who feels mind boggling amazement followed by a sense of depression that we are too short-lived, too primitive and too weak to be able to visit and explore these distant galaxies?

It is like we are given a glimpse of this insane and terrifyingly beautiful expanse with the knowledge that that's all it will ever amount to. Like a child looking through the glass window at the limitless world outside without any hopes of reaching it while knowing that she will never be able to get out of the house.

> The team is composed of […]

A lot of people. Looks like a movie credits roll.