Steward PhD alum captures the most detailed infrared map ever of our Milky Way
A team of astronomers, led by Steward Observatory PhD alumnus Dante Minniti, have published a gigantic infrared map of the Milky Way containing more than 1.5 billion objects ― the most detailed one ever made. Using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, the team monitored the central regions of our Galaxy over more than 13 years. At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.
“We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever,” says Dante Minniti, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile who led the overall project.
In 1988, with the support of the Vatican Observatory, Dante Minniti obtained the first 'Father Martin McCarthy' scholarship to carry out his graduate studies at the UofA Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory, where he obtained his PhD in 1993 with his thesis work on 'Kinematics and stellar populations of the galactic bulge.'
Now, Minniti has gone on to lead a team of astronomers in building a record-breaking map that comprises 200000 images taken by ESO’s VISTA ― the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy. Located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, the telescope’s main purpose is to map large areas of the sky. The team used VISTA’s infrared camera VIRCAM, which can peer through the dust and gas that permeates our galaxy. It is therefore able to see the radiation from the Milky Way’s most hidden places, opening a unique window onto our galactic surroundings.