The Adler planetarium unveiled an enormous 2.5 billion pixel mosaic of the Galaxy! It’s composed of 800,000 separate Spitzer Space Telescope images stitched together.

The images are in the infrared, well outside what the eye can see. The colors represent IR light at 3.6, 8, and 24 microns (depicted in the picture as blue, green, and red). Different objects emit at different wavelengths: warm dust is red, while nebulae forming stars are yellow. The diffuse green glow seen everywhere in the image is from complex organic molecules called PAHs, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. On Earth those are created when fossil fuels are burned; in space, they are byproducts of stellar birth and death.

Tags: planetarium, astronomy, telescopes, awesome photo,

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