Astronomers have released one of the largest Milky Way data dumps ever, cataloging an incredible 3.32 billion cosmic objects in detail. The end result is a giant image that can be zoomed in and out for a stunning sense of scale.
Anyone who has ever looked up at the sky on a clear night without light pollution has been amazed at the number of stars. Counting and cataloging them all may seem like an impossible task, but generational surveys such as PAN-STARRS, Sloan, and Gaia have attempted just that. Each has created a more detailed view of the universe, and now we may have the most detailed view ever.
The latest is the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2). This observes the disk of the Milky Way with light at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. The instrument is located on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile, at an altitude of 2,200 m (7,200 ft) and has a clear view of the southern sky.
Following its initial data release in 2017, DECaPS2 consists of 21,400 individual exposures representing over 10 TB of data, with astronomers identifying approximately 3.32 billion objects in the images. increase. Both data releases combined cover 6.5% of his entire night sky, or about 13,000 times the size of a full moon in the sky.
The Milky Way disk appears as a bright blob of light covered in dust. This makes it difficult to distinguish between individual stars and celestial bodies. The telescope’s near-infrared view helps see through dust, and new data processing techniques that predict the background behind each star can help pull stars out of crowds and nebulae.
DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
And the end result is incredible. This image begins with a view that looks like you’re looking up at the sky with the naked eye, but zooming in on random patches that catch the eye reveals more tangible stars. , if you want to feel small and insignificant at the same time, this is the picture for you.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we were careful to identify sources that simply point to regions of very high star density and appear nearly overlapping each other,” Study said. “This allowed us to create the largest catalog ever from a single camera in terms of the number of objects observed.”
The data collected for this survey will spark the curiosity and research of astronomers for years to come.
This research Supplement to the Journal of AstrophysicsGet a glimpse of the images and datasets in the video below, or see the zoomable images here.
Billions of celestial bodies revealed in giant survey of the Milky Way
Source: NOIR Lab
