The most detailed map ever made of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, includes 219 million stars.
A team led by Geert Barentsen of the University of Hertfordshire in the UK combined 10 years of observations by the Isaac Newton Telescope to build the map, and this image is just a slice.
The map includes every star brighter than 20th magnitude – 1 million times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye.
The orange swirls show the density of stars detected and their position in relation to the centre of the galaxy. The brighter the orange, the more stars can be detected shining in that part of space.
The dark regions are the edge of the galaxy's Sagittarius spiral arm (near longitude 60 degrees) and the Cygnus X nebula (at around 80 degrees longitude), where the stars are obscured by dust.
Journal reference: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu1651
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