Minniti Abstract

The Vista Variables in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) is a public near-IR variability survey scanning the Milky Way bulge and an adjacent section of the disk. The main goal of the VVV Survey is to map the 3D structure of the Galactic bulge and decide among different models of bulge formation. The survey will take 193 nights of observations with the ESO 4-m VISTA telescope between 2010 and 2016, covering a billion point sources across an area of 540 deg2. The final product will be a deep near-IR atlas in the YZJHKs passbands (0.9-2.5 micron), and a catalogue of more than a million variable point sources. The Survey has already produced a number of scientific results and discoveries that will be presented in this talk.