Scientists Drop Absolutely Stunning New View of the Milky Way Galaxy

Saw this article during my morning reading.

Scientists drop absolutely stunning new view of the Milky Way galaxy

The above article references the main one.

Billions of Celestial Objects Revealed in Gargantuan Survey of the Milky Way

Space is so humbling. Here we are in what is generally considered a below averaged sized galaxy, but there still are likely more than 100 BILLION stars in our galaxy. Then you add on something like the Hubble Deep Field image (HDF), my mind starts to blow again. The HDF covers an area of the sky that is the angular size of a tennis ball at 100 meters.

One peek into a small part of the sky, one giant leap back in time. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope provided one of the deepest, most detailed visible views of the universe. Representing a narrow “keyhole” view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away. The field is a very small sample of the heavens but it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space. In this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.

Every dot in this image is a galaxy, and there are around 1500 of them in this TINY section of sky. It’s not hard to then jump to the new images from the “Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey” and realize that the new panorama contains over 3.32 BILLION celestial objects, just from our galaxy.

Space is fascinating! Check out the photos from the links above. Be careful, if you’re a space fanatic like me, you will end up digging further.

Scientists Drop Absolutely Stunning New View of the Milky Way Galaxy

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