Part of the Milky Way photographed by the Ruhr University in Bochum. – Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) / Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB)

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This is the largest-ever image of the space. Researchers at the Ruhr University in Bochum, western Germany, have released a massive photograph of the Milky Way 46 billion pixels, which, on a dedicated website, zoom in on different parts of our galaxy.

This gigantic photograph of 855,000 by 54,000 pixels, which weighs 194 GB, was conducted by assembling images taken from the observatory of the Atacama Plateau in Chile. The subject being particularly large, the southern part of the Milky Way has been divided into 268 sections to be “immortalized” and then assembled puzzle by the team of Professor Rolf Chini.

The scientist observed Milky Way for five years, the site says The Refer Space , looking for objects whose brightness varies with time. These variations can for example indicate that a planet passes in front of a star.

The site offers the ability to search specific parts of the Galaxy returning directly contact information. View the entire full resolution image would require a “wall” of 22,000 Full HD TVs, notes the astronomer Moritz Hackstein.