This 9 Gigapixel Image with 84 Million Stars Of The Milky Way Will Give You Chills

It’s simply hard to grasp with words! It’s an image that contains 84 MILLION starts! It’s 9-gigapixel map of the Milky Way Galaxy and it will simply take your breath away!

The image you’re about to see bellow shows stunning view of the core of Milky way (our galaxy) as shoot by the VISTA telescope from the European Space Agency.

With naked eye you would see the center of the milky way with stunning number of stars and comic dust clouds.

Thanks to VISTA telescope we got one of the most detail portraits of the Milky Way EVER produced which has allowed astronomers to catalog a staggering 84 million stars.

After seeing this image it’s selfish to say that we are alone in our the galaxy…

Thanks to Ancient-Code for this amazing video with additional information:

The above image is just a small, reduced—thumbanil version of the original image which has a mind-boggling resolution of 108,500×81,500—or if you prefer 9 gigapixels, occupying 24.6 gigabytes. If for some reason you want to download the 24.6-gigabyte image you can do so by clicking here.

You can check the entire 9 gigapixel image and even zoom in the stars by clicking here. You have to use the zoom tool in order to fully experience the uniqueness of the image.

ESO’s VISTA telescope—which stands for Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy—in order to obtain this image, snapped thousands of images of the sky after which astronomers compiled them into one 9 gigapixel mosaic. The Vista telescope is one of the LARGEST visible and near infrared telescopes on the planet, and it just showed us how cool it really is which this mind-bending image.

The image you are seeing is crystal clear because the VISTA telescope boasts a stunning infrared camera which enables it to peer through the dust clouds that obscure the view of other telescopes.

In order to understand how powerful the VISTA telescope really is, here below is a comparison between an image of the Milky Way—the same image—as seen from an infrared telescope and a visible telescope.

Stunning right?! How can you see this and say we are alone. It just doesn’t make sense!

However, this image wasn’t taken just for aesthetic purposes. This gigantic image has allowed scientists and astronomers to identify numerous cosmic objects in space that are worth researching further. This image allowed astronomers to identify 84 million stars in the Milky Way.

Our cosmic home—the Milky Way—is part of a supermassive structure interconnected by over 800 galaxies located at around 1000 million light years away. Our galaxy is part of an intergalactic highway that stretches some 500 million light years across and contains around 100,000,000,000,000,000 Suns, dubbed by scientists as Laniakea.

Oh and, just a fun fact here, did you know that astronomers maintain that there are around 500 billion galaxies in the known universe, which means there are around 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×10²²) habitable planets. Astronomers argue that just inside our Milky Way Galaxy, there are some 400 BILLION STARS.

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Originally inspired by Ivan and published on Ancient-Code

Image credit: ESO