Scientists have created the first detailed map of the Milky Way using two of the world's largest radio telescopes.
The 100 metre Max-Planck radio telescope in Germany and the 64 metre CSIRO radio telescope in Australia were commissioned for the study to produce the HI4PI map of our galaxy.
The project analysed neutral atomic hydrogen - the most abundant element in space and the main component of stars and galaxies - and required more than one million individual observations and 10 billion data points.
Although neutral hydrogen is easy to detect with radio telescopes, mapping the whole sky is a significant achievement because 'noise' from mobile phones and broadcast stations pollute the faint emissions coming from the Universe.
University of Bonn astronomer Dr Juergen Kerp said: "Sophisticated computer algorithms have to be developed to clean each individual data point of this unwanted human interference.
"Next to the thousands of observing hours an even larger amount of time has been spent creating the final scientific data product released today."
Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, said the study reveals fine details of structures between stars in the Milky Way for the first time.
"Pilot studies of the HI4PI data show a wealth of filamentary structures never seen before," he said. "Tiny clouds become visible that appear to have fuelled star formation in the Milky Way for billions of years.
"These objects are too dim and too small to be detected even in the other galaxies closest to us."
Dr Benjamin Winkel, from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said having a clearer picture of the hydrogen in the Milky Way would help astronomers explore galaxies in deep space.
"Like the clouds in the sky, all observations we receive from the distant Universe have to pass through hydrogen in our own Milky Way," he said.
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