At ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, the telescope’s main purpose is to map large sky areas.
The team used VISTA’s infrared camera, VIRCAM, which can peer through the dust and gas that permeates our galaxy. It can, therefore, see the radiation from the Milky Way’s most hidden places, opening a unique window onto our galactic surroundings.
This gigantic dataset covers an area of the sky equivalent to 8,600 full moons and contains about ten times more objects than a previous map released by the same team in 2012.
It includes newborn stars, which are often embedded in dusty cocoons, and globular clusters, dense groups of millions of the Milky Way’s oldest stars.

Observing infrared light means VISTA can also spot very cold objects, which glow at these wavelengths, like brown dwarfs (‘failed’ stars that do not have sustained nuclear fusion) or free-floating planets that don’t orbit a star.
The observations began in 2010 and ended in the first half of 2023, spanning a total of 420 nights.
“The project was a monumental effort, made possible because we were surrounded by a great team,” says Roberto Saito, an astrophysicist at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil and lead author of the paper published Thursday (26 Sep) in Astronomy & Astrophysics on the completion of the project.
With the surveys now complete, the scientific exploration of the gathered data will continue for decades to come.
Produced in association with SWNS Talker