By: EFE
The European Space Agency (ESA) released an” unusual “photograph of the Milky Way taken by satellite GAIA, whose mission is to develop a three dimensional map of the Milky Way and generate a catalog 1,000 million stars.
The image, which also shows the neighboring galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds, shows the silhouette of the Milky Way in profile, so that the brightest regions of instant indicate a higher concentration of stars .
“The darker regions correspond to dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust which absorb starlight to stand in the line of sight,” ESA said in a statement.
This is what is known as “galactic plane”, ie, the “projection on the sky of the galactic disk, a flattened some 100,000 light years in diameter and a thickness of only 1,000 light-years structure,” the Space Agency European.
Beyond the plane are visible only a few objects, especially the Magellanic Clouds -Big and small- and two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, in the lower right portion of the image .
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