Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
The VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) is a large ESO public
survey of the Southern Milky Way (http://vvvsurvey.org). It is aiming
to provide a deep near-infrared atlas of the bulge and an adjacent part
of the mid-plane in 5 passbands, and time-series photometry of a billion
point sources with a time-base of at least 5 years. In the first part of
the talk I will describe the design, immediate scientific goals, observations,
data processing, and current status of the VVV Survey. In the second part,
I will share interesting new results and discoveries made by the VVV
Science Team, and outline some important future prospects. These cover a huge variety of
projects, ranging from Solar System studies to the mapping of the Galactic
structure, and from the search for variable stars to the census of background
galaxies and high energy sources.
