PREVIEW

Stunning new images of the Milky Way have been unveiled as part of what scientists describe as the most detailed infrared map ever created.

The map consists of approximately 200,000 images, captured over the past 13 years, which have been layered on top of each other.

The images, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) VISTA telescope, have provided scientists with a more accurate 3D perspective of the Milky Way's inner regions.

These regions, previously obscured by thick interstellar dust, are responsible for the dark patches seen within the star-filled night sky.

The published images represent just a portion of a much larger map, which contains over 1.5 billion cosmic objects.

That number is around 10 times the quantity of celestial objects included in the ESO's previous map, released in 2012.

The ESO, an intergovernmental research organisation composed of 16 member states focused on ground-based astronomy, including the UK, created this massive dataset of 500 terabytes, covering an area of the sky equivalent to 8,600 full moons.

For context, 500 terabytes is the equivalent of more than 40 years of video or 166 million songs.

This is the largest observational project ever conducted with an ESO telescope.

Lead researcher Dante Minniti, from the Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile, said: "We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever."

By peering through the dust and gas, scientists were able to observe radiation from the Milky Way’s most hidden regions.

The team discovered newborn stars, often shrouded in dusty cocoons out of sight, along with globular clusters.

Globular clusters are dense collections of tens of thousands to millions of stars, containing some of the oldest stars in the galaxy.

Many objects in the universe are too cold and faint to be visible in regular light.

However, they can be detected using infrared technology.

The VISTA telescope's ability to observe infrared light allows it to detect brown dwarfs, which are significantly smaller and colder than typical stars.

Free-floating planets without a star to orbit can also be observed by the telescope, located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.

In addition, researchers tracked hypervelocity stars - runaway stars traveling at 1.5 million miles per hour after interacting with a supermassive black hole.