UNAM joins international effort to map the Milky Way with new spectroscopic survey

The Institute of Astronomy at Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) is part of a nine‑country consortium that is using the Local Volume Mapper (LVM) – a component of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS‑V) – to create the first polychromatic spectroscopic map of the Milky Way and its nearby environment. The LVM combines four small telescopes and three spectrographs to record light across thousands of wavelengths simultaneously, allowing researchers to trace ionised gas, star‑forming regions and the structure of nearby dwarf galaxies such as the Small Magellanic Cloud.

Project leader Sebastián Francisco Sánchez Sánchez explained that no previous instrument could cover such large sky areas with this spectral resolution, making the survey a “quantitative and qualitative leap.” The data will serve as a local reference for interpreting observations of distant galaxies and for studying the physics of interstellar gas at unprecedented scales.