See the X-ray sky like you’ve never seen it before. The eROSITA space telescope has been observing the sky for several years, and now researchers have published a map showing half of the sky. This is the largest map of high energy resources ever created.

The data was collected between December 2019 and June 2020 and revealed more than 900,000 unique resources. Of these, 710,000 sources are supermassive black holes in other galaxies. There are 180,000 X-ray sources from our own stars, as well as 12,000 galaxy clusters and many exotic objects emitting high-energy light, including the Vela pulsar, brightly visible at the center of this map.

“These are striking figures for X-ray astronomy,” Andrea Merloni, eROSITA principal investigator and first author of the eROSITA catalogue, said in a statement. “We discovered more resources in six months than the major flagship XMM-Newton and Chandra missions combined in almost 25 years of operation.”

The eROSITA collaboration has published 200 papers so far, and with the publication of this impressive catalogue, they have made 50 more available for review. There are newly discovered filaments between galaxy clusters, quasi-periodically exploding black holes and much more. Another very interesting study points out the discovery of more than 1000 galaxy superclusters. The density of data and discoveries is unprecedented in X-ray astronomy.

“The scientific scope and impact of the research is astonishing; It is difficult to describe this in a few words,” added Mara Salvato, who coordinates the efforts of around 250 scientists as a representative of the German eROSITA consortium. “But the documents published by the team will speak for themselves.”

“The eROSITA collaboration has done an outstanding job of publishing the data and publishing all these amazing new results simultaneously,” said Kirpal Nandra, director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. “We still have a lot to do, and we can’t wait to see what the rest of the world does with public data.”

A major release is expected in about two weeks. eROSITA’s goals include better constraining cosmological models given the current uncertainties that plague the leading model. The constraints to be presented in the following study are based on the galaxy clusters seen in this catalogue.