Star scientist fills in celestial gaps

The celestial harvest from astronomy’s most thorough high-resolution digital survey of the entire sky, completed by twin infrared telescopes, is now online for scientists to scrutinize and the world to savor.

“The public will ‘ooooh’ and ‘aaaah’ at the pictures, while scientists mine the data for decades, learning a great deal more than we currently know about our Milky Way galaxy, its hundreds of millions of stars and the millions of galaxies in the nearby universe,” said Michael Skrutskie, U.Va. professor of astronomy and principal investigator for the Two Micron All-Sky Survey.

Skrutskie came to U.Va. in August 2001 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he and colleagues did the bulk of the survey’s astronomical work.

The survey was conducted at infrared wavelengths, which are longer than the red light seen by the human eye. Infrared wavelengths penetrate dust better than visible light, making them an effective tool for detecting dust-obscured objects both inside and outside of our Milky Way.

“For the first time in history, we can, in effect, step outside our galaxy and see it in detail, as it would appear from above,” Skrutskie said. “We can also see the texture in the distribution of galaxies outside the Milky Way. Before this survey, astronomers tried to connect the dots, but nearly one-third of the galaxies were obscured by dust. Now, we can connect all the dots.”