Find your way through the Milky Way

Astronomers working in Cambridge, England and Hawaii have created the biggest and most detailed map ever made of the centre of the Milky Way.

They created it using a state-of-the-art camera called a "Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array" or SCUBA, along with the 15-metre James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, JCMT, in Hawaii.

Working over a two-year period, the researchers spent 15 nights at the telescope making observations.

Sagittarius A*

At the centre of the galaxy, conditions are dramatically different from the rest of the Milky Way. At the very heart lies an object astronomers call Sagittarius A*. They believe it's a supermassive black hole - about 2.6 million times the mass of our sun.

Wayne Holland, who led the group in Hawaii, says "SCUBA is a wonderful instrument, and the most sensitive camera of its type. Its unmatched mapping speed has revolutionised this field of astronomy."

The map also shows giant streamers and vast clouds of gas where stars are being born some 26,000 light years from Earth.

It also shows a wide network of wispy filaments. The region is full of gas bubbles and shells - structures believed to be shaped by winds from, and explosions of, stars, and by twisted magnetic field lines.

Eye on the future

SCUBA's successor, SCUBA-2, is capable of creating the map Holland's team created in less than half an hour, so mapping the entire galactic plane may soon become a reality.

But SCUBA-2 is still limited by distance. The hearts of other galaxies are much farther away and still can't be mapped in much detail.

Astronomers are hopeful the planned Atacama Large Millimetre Array, Alma, telescope, which will consist of 64, 12-metre radio telescopes, will let astronomers extend their survey to other galaxies.

Construction on Alma, which will be located in Chile, will start in 2002.