“At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.”
VISTA watched the center of the galaxy for 420 nights over 13 years and catalogued more than 1.5 billion objects. That is ten times the team’s 2012 map. Infrared cuts through the dust that hides the inner Milky Way, so the map shows brown dwarfs, free-floating planets and stars thrown out by the central black hole. The data is too big to release as a single image. Astronomers will be mining it for decades.