The entire sky's infrared emissions are captured in this image released last week by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). The plane of the Milky Way galaxy appears as a bright strip running through the middle, with the black hole at its heart emitting strongly. The bright spot at the lower right is the neighbouring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Credit: JAXA/ISAS/LIRA

This map was assembled from thousands of images taken by JAXA's AKARI satellite, which has been in orbit since February 2006. “What you are seeing now is the result of the comprehensive coverage of the entire sky, the result of a year's scanning,” says team member Chris Pearson of ESA, who is based in Japan.

The latest map has a higher resolution and sensitivity than the whole-sky infrared map compiled by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in 1984. Stars that were previously blurs are now distinct entities.

AKARI has also surveyed colder galaxies than IRAS was able to detect. It will keep collecting data until it runs out of the liquid helium needed to keep its detectors cold — which is expected to happen in early September 2007.