A treat for astronomers: Largest collage map of Milky Way now online [1]

A team of astronomers from Germany have compiled the largest astronomical image of the Milky Way galaxy so far, the Ruhr-Universität Bochum [2] (RUB) announced on October 21, 2015.

​Small region of Milky Way showing the Eta Carinae star. Image credit: Lehrstuhl für Astrophysik, RUB

Scientists have monitored our Galaxy for five years, searching for objects with variable brightness, such as stars in front of which a planet is crossing or systems of stars that orbit and obscur each other. For this purpose the team has been observing the southern night sky on a nightly basis using the telescope at Bochum's University Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile. So far, over 50 000 bright variable objects have been detected during the project.