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LiveScience
LiveScience
Ben Turner

'We have changed the view of our galaxy forever': Astronomers capture most detailed ever infrared map of the Milky Way

VISTA scans the sky above Chile's Atacama desert.

Astronomers have created the most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way — and it contains more than 1.5 billion objects. 

Made using 13 years of observations across 420 nights, the new map charts a vast number of stars, "failed" brown dwarfs, free-floating planets and hypervelocity suns launched into space after close encounters with our galaxy's central supermassive black hole.

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