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A ribbon of red splotches interspersed with blue dots marks the largest, most detailed image of the Milky Way in radio wavelengths ever assembled, researchers report October 28 in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

This new side view of our fairly flat spiral galaxy, as seen from Earth’s southern hemisphere, will help astronomers find and classify objects within it and better understand ongoing processes, says astronomer Silvia Mantovanini of Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

The new image was prompted by the search for supernova remnants, leftover bubbles of gas and dust from exploding stars. Most of these objects have been discovered in radio light because they can continue emitting radio waves for tens of thousands of years after an explosion, Mantovanini says.

Researchers have detected about 300 supernova remnants in the Milky Way but estimate that roughly 2,000 exist. Studying more stellar remains will shed light on the last evolutionary stages of stars and their grand finales, Mantovanini says. However, it was difficult to distinguish supernova remnants from other objects with past telescopes and surveys.

The radio light view of the Milky Way towards its center (top) has been artificially colored to show lower-frequency waves in red and higher-frequency waves in blue. It reveals a different perspective of the same region of the galaxy in visible light (bottom).S. Mantovanini and the GLEAM-X team (top); Axel Mellinger/milkywaysky.com (bottom)

Mantovanini and colleagues compiled observations of radio waves captured over more than 140 nights from 2013 to 2020. The data came from the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in Western Australia during two surveys mapping the southern hemisphere sky. Each observation took a snapshot of one section of the sky and lasted about two minutes, capturing a specific range of radio wavelengths.

Stitching together almost 2,000 of these observations using supercomputers revealed a dazzling edge-on view toward the center of the Milky Way, spanning roughly 60,000 light-years, or just over half the galaxy’s width. The team stacked 20 versions of the image, each a different color to represent a specific range of radio wavelengths, with longer wavelengths depicted in red and shorter wavelengths in blue. The colors hint at the mechanisms behind the radio emissions, such as heat-related radiation from stellar nurseries, which look like blue bubbles, and emissions from supernova remnants that don’t come from heat, which appear as red bubbles.

This multicolored view of the Milky Way makes it easy to distinguish goings-on within the galaxy, Mantovanini says. Its creation “reminded me that we’re just a small part of something incredibly complex.”