Milky Way's 219 million stars mapped: Scientists spend 10 years creating world's most detailed chart of our galaxy

From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a glowing band stretching across the sky.

For centuries, people have peered up at this hazy light, attempting to discover and make sense of the objects within it.

Now astronomers have managed to chart 219 million stars in the Milky Way in an incredible new map, which is the largest of its kind ever produced.

Scientists at the University of Hertfordshire spent 10 years creating the map using a 8.2ft (2.5 metre) mirror on the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in the Canary Islands.

The chart shows the visible part of the northern region of our home galaxy and includes details on different features for each of the 219 million detected objects.

The INT program charted all the stars brighter than 20th magnitude – or one million times fainter than can be seen with the human eye.

The darker fog-like region is galactic dust that obscures astronomer’s view of the Milky Way.

Bright areas show stellar regions. The brighter the section, the more stars are packed into that area.

Our view of the Milky Way's disk is also edge on, which means astronomers have to create a picture from the inside out to study it.

Scientists say this new map gives them a new and vivid insight into the structure of this vast system of stars, gas and dust.

They claim it will give all of us new and vivid insight into the structure of the vast system of stars, gas and dust in which we live.

It follows another map released earlier this month showing Laniakea - the gigantic super-cluster of galaxies that contains our own Milky Way.

The word means 'immeasurable heaven' in Hawaiian - an appropriate description for a structure 500 million light years across that contains 100,000 galaxies and the mass of a hundred quadrillion suns.

Scientists have long-known that galaxies are not distributed randomly but congregate together in clusters.

On the largest scales, galaxies are strung out like pearls, forming glowing 'filaments'.

Where these intersect they produce enormous 'superclusters' of galaxies whose motion is affected by gravity.

The Milky Way sits near the edge of one such supercluster, the first to have its size mapped by astronomers.