The spectacular new image of the Milky Way marks the completion of the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL). This is the sharpest such map yet made, and compliments those from recent space-based surveys.

(European Southern Observatory )

In the most detailed image of the Milky Way yet, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope captured the star-forming regions of the galaxy, which will help astronomers estimate the density of the clouds distributed along its plane.

According to the European Southern Observatory, the survey taken by the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) , which is more than four times larger than the first image released in 2009. The new map also has a higher quality.

“ATLASGAL provides exciting insights into where the next generation of high-mass stars and clusters form. By combining these with observations from Planck, we can now obtain a link to the large-scale structures of giant molecular clouds,” said Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR)’s Timea Csengeri, who led the work of combining information from APEX with iPlanck data.

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Brought together, the Planck and APEX data allowed astronomers to detect emission spread over a larger area of sky and to estimate the amount of dense gas in the inner galaxy. The ATLASGAL data was also used to create a complete census of cold and massive clouds where new generations of stars are forming.

The APEX telescope, which recently celebrated ten years of successful research, plays an important role not only as a pathfinder, but also as a complementary facility to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). APEX is based on a prototype antenna constructed for the ALMA project, and it has found many targets that ALMA can study in great detail.

“ATLASGAL has allowed us to have a new and transformational look at the dense interstellar medium of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The new release of the full survey opens up the possibility to mine this marvelous dataset for new discoveries. Many teams of scientists are already using the ATLASGAL data to plan for detailed ALMA follow-up,” said ATLASGAL team member Leonardo Testi.

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The ESO 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile, during observations. (ESO/S. Brunier)