Hitchhiker's Guide To The Milky Way Gets A Cold Dust Map
Friday, July 3, 2009 - 11:35
in Astronomy & Space
Astronomers have unveiled a new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way - that's our home galaxy, if you're from someplace else - and it's peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust, the potential birthplaces of new stars. Using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this survey is the largest map of cold dust so far. This new guide for astronomers, known as the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) shows the Milky Way in submillimetre-wavelength light (between infrared light and radio waves. Images of the cosmos at these wavelengths are vital for studying the birthplaces of new stars and the structure of the crowded galactic core. read more
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