I received a press release via email from the ESO with the headline “Largest image of its kind shows hidden chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way.” Well, that sounds interesting, so I clicked the link to view the article – it has a beautiful image of the Milky Way’s Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). The article stated that some of the data for the image was gathered by the ESO’s VISTA telescope.
Wait, I seem to recall that the Vatican Observatory’s Adjunct Scholar Dante Minniti has used the VISTA telescope for some research that I recently posted about… this might be something he’d be interested in!
Then I looked down at the credit line of the image, and there was Dante’s name! So, yea… I guess he IS interested in this!
From the press release:
Astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset — the largest ALMA image to date — will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its centre.
Image Caption: This image shows the complex distribution of molecular gas in the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) of the Milky Way. It was obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner. This map is as long as three full Moons side-by-side in the sky, and it is in fact the largest ALMA image ever obtained.
This map is part of ACES — the ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey — a project designed to understand how gas condenses into stars in the extreme and chaotic environment at the heart of our galaxy. The survey has charted the distribution of dozens of different molecules, five of which are shown here in different colours: sulphur monoxide (cyan), silicon monoxide (green), isocyanic acid (red), cyanoacetylene (blue), and carbon monosulphide (magenta).
The stars in the foreground of this image were observed at infrared wavelengths (Y, Z and J filters) with ESO’s VISTA telescope as part of a different project. The actual density of stars in the CMZ is much higher than what is shown here, where we have opted to highlight the details in the molecular cloud. Note that the edges of the ALMA map appear somewhat sharp because the ALMA observations do not cover the entire rectangular area here.
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ESO Article: Largest ALMA image ever shows the molecular gas in the centre of the Milky Way
Dante Minniti told me:
“This is very nice. They used our VVV image for comparison, this is why my name appears in the ALMA PR.
The images provided by the VVV survey are deep, high resolution near-IR images of the central region of the Milky Way obtained with the VISTA telescope at ESO Paranal Observatory.”
