A groundbreaking project led by researchers from Villanova University, funded by NASA, has unveiled an extraordinary view of the magnetic fields at the heart of the Milky Way. This collaboration has produced a visual unlike any other, showcasing the intricate magnetic fields that play a crucial role in the formation of stars and planets.
The map, a result of the project, stands out as the most extensive one ever created using data from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Despite SOFIA being retired in 2022, its legacy lives on through this map, which spans nearly 500 light-years. It reveals the interaction between magnetic fields and dust at the galaxy’s core, a relationship vital to understanding the birth of stars, planets, and potentially life itself.
The “Fireplace” project, short for Far-InfraREd Polarimetric Large Area CMZ Exploration, aimed to measure the polarization of radiation from dust aligned by the galaxy’s magnetic fields. With funding from NASA in 2020, the project utilized SOFIA, a telescope mounted on a 747 aircraft flying at 45,000 feet. Over nine flights, the team gathered the necessary data.
This newly completed map distinguishes different temperatures at the galaxy’s center using a color-coded system. Warm dust clouds appear in pink, cooler ones in blue, and radio filaments are highlighted in yellow.
This map adds to the rich history of innovative Milky Way maps. In July 2022, an animation modeling the galaxy’s dust was released, based on fresh data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission and the 2MASS All Sky Survey. The EXPLORE project’s map, covering about 13,000 light-years, reveals dust swirls and areas along the galactic plane, aiding cosmologists by highlighting dust-free regions for clearer cosmic studies.
Viewed from a distance, the Milky Way would resemble a thin disk, home to approximately 300 billion stars. A recent massive survey of the galactic plane, using the Dark Energy Camera, identified over three billion celestial objects, marking one of the largest catalogs of its kind.
In January, the Dark Energy Camera’s data, captured at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, was used to create a vast image of the Milky Way’s galactic plane. This image, revealing over three billion objects by observing at near-infrared wavelengths, allows astronomers to detect fainter stars and see through dust clouds.
The same observatory will soon host the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), set to begin later this year. With the most powerful camera ever built, the LSST will image the entire southern hemisphere night sky every three nights over ten years, aiding in the discovery of cosmic events within the Milky Way and beyond.
Here’s to clear skies and wide eyes as we continue to explore the mysteries of our galaxy and the universe.