This area, is active in star formation and very rich in dust and interstellar gas, which makes it impossible to see through in the visible as the extinction and crowding are high.
The final product of the VVV Survey will be a deep near-IR atlas in five passbands and a catalogue of more than a million variable point sources.
For a complete understanding of the variable sources in the Milky Way, the observations will be combined with data from MACHO, OGLE, EROS, VST, Spitzer, HST, Chandra, INTEGRAL, WISE, Fermi lAT, XMM-Newton, GAIA and ALMA.
As a public survey, the VVV provides data available to the whole community and enable further studies of the history of the Milky Way, its globular cluster evolution and the population census of the Galactic Bulge, as well as the investigation of the star forming regions in the disk.
An scenario believed to be the dominant channel of formation of bulges in late-type spirals (Sbc), however, the Milky Way is problematic to understand under this context, because while its surface brightness shows a barred structure, its stellar population is predominantly old.
Among the variable stars are RR Lyraes and Cepheids, which are well-understood distance indicators that will provide the 3rd dimension on the 3-D map of the surveyed region that will yield important information on the ages of the populations.
A comparison between the RR Lyrae and type II Cepheids in the field and in globular clusters may hold precious information about the formation of the bulge (e.g. Feast et al., 2008).
Our proposed search for RR Lyrae and type II Cepheids in the Galactic bulge will reveal the presence of debris related to the accretion events that might have left behind NGC 6441 as remnant object.
The addition of this region will also permit us to discriminate between various models of the inner Galactic structure which, besides the triaxial bulge, contain a long bar and a ring (e.g., López-Corredoira et al., 2007), or not (e.g., Merrifield, 2004, and references therein).
A near-IR survey will be more sensitive to all but the reddest objects, and the superior spatial resolution in these wavebands will be essential for resolving distant clusters and the crowded field populations.