After 10 years of research, scientists were able to come up with a detailed map of the entire stretch of the Milky Way.
Based on observations from the European Space Agency's Gaia probe, the map only accounts about 1% of the Milky Way's stars.
An animation of the data shows two revolving spheres, similar to the Earth's glove with the sky plotted on each.
"We've put the data together from both hemispheres, a bit like putting maps of our own world together from the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere and picturing the globe for the first time," Professor Staveley-Smith said.
The map produced by a survey named the HI4PI Project is a joint collaboration between an Australian and a German survey.
The project utilized the largest fully steerable radio telescopes in the southern and northern hemispheres namely: Australia's 64m CSIRO Parkes dish and the 100m Max-Planck telescope in Effelsberg, Germany.
Its shows the most detailed study of all the hydrogen gas produced by the stars in our galaxy including the boundaries of supershells created by giant explosions.
Professor Naomi McClure-Griffiths from the Australian National University said that the study revealed the finest details of structures between stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Adding that her research was using the data map to answer the questions behind the mysteries of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies.
Dr. Benjamin Winkel, from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, quipped
that having a clear picture of the Hydrogen in the Milky Way would greatly help astronomers discover new galaxies even at cosmological distances.
'Like the clouds in the sky, all observations we receive from the distant Universe have to pass through hydrogen in our own Milky Way,' he said. 'The HI4PI data allows us to correct accurately for all these hydrogen clouds and clean the window we are watching through.'
The newest discovery opens doors to extraordinary amounts of data that might revolutionize humans understanding of the stars in our galaxy.
