ATLASGAL takes a novel look at the Milky Way

Space explorations have taken a leap ever since Hubble telescope turned 25, India reached Mars, NASA got uncomfortably close to Pluto and Philae landed successfully on a flying comet. India might even get the largest telescope in the world set up in Ladakh. The Apex Telescope was not far behind when European Southern Observatory (ESO) released never before seen images of the Milky Way Galaxy in February. The event marked the completion of APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL).

ATLASGAL is a compilation of several images and it tries to visualise stars from beyond the dust and cloud that obscures stars. The images of the milky way that have been captured would not have been possible six years ago. The telescope located in Chile has mapped the full area of the Galactic Plane visible from the southern hemisphere at submillimetre wavelengths — between infrared light and radio waves. ESO claims that this is the sharpest such map made till date and complements those from recent space-based surveys.

APEX, the 12 metre Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope, is located at 5100 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile’s Atacama region. The ATLASGAL data were also used to create a complete census of cold and massive clouds where new generations of stars are forming.

Ian Gassman from The Examiner said ,”Seeing as submillimeter light can shine through pesky space dust, this map has revealed a whole slew of previously unseen star-forming regions and general areas of interest. The gaseous Trifid and Lagoon nebulas, for instance, sit several thousand light-years away from us. They only used to glow in infrared light, but in ATLASGAL images, they are as clear as day. The Milky Way’s center is also far less blurry, even though it’s 28,000 light-years out.”

In the press release by ESO, Leonardo Testi , who is a member of the ATLASGAL team and the European Project Scientist for the ALMA project said, “ATLASGAL has allowed us to have a new and transformational look at the dense interstellar medium of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The new release of the full survey opens up the possibility to mine this marvellous dataset for new discoveries. Many teams of scientists are already using the ATLASGAL data to plan for detailed ALMA follow-up.”

Dust clouds in places like the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas (circled, left), both a few thousand light-years away, glow faintly, as do filaments of detritus in the center of the galaxy (circled, right), 28,000 light-years from Earth. At near-infrared wave-lengths (center row), these regions nearly vanish behind obscuring curtains of dust. The galactic center remains hidden in visible light (bottom row) as well, though hot stars in Trifid and Lagoon radiate pools of hydrogen gas, making them glow. Image credit : Science News

Watch the entire video here. Video courtesy: Slate.com