Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The University is host to the Principal Investigator of the IPHAS survey, observing the Northern Galactic Plane, using the 2.5-metre Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) based on the Spanish island of La Palma.

The IPHAS survey, which to date includes some 200 million unique objects in the newly released catalogue, will foster studies that can be at once both comprehensive and subtle, of the stellar demographics of the Milky Way and of its three-dimensional structure.

“We are able to look at some of the least understood stars in the Galaxy – those at the early and very late stages of their life cycles,” said Prof Janet Drew of the University of Hertfordshire.

“These represent less than one in a thousand stars, so the IPHAS data will lead to a greatly improve our picture of stellar evolution.”

Conducted by looking at light emitted by hydrogen ions, the survey contains stunning red images of nebulae and stars.

This initial data release is of observations of the the star filled section of the Northern Plane of the Milky Way, with image resolution high enough to permit the detection of individual stars in addition to the diffuse gas that makes up the often-beautiful glowing nebulae that lower spatial resolution surveys have previously made known.

The IPHAS survey will eventually be extended to cover the entire galactic plane of our galaxy, with a coverage approaching 4000 square degrees, no mean feat when it is considered that the moon on the sky as seen from Earth covers around just 0.1 square degrees.

The data is described in a paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.