2 years later A team of astronomers took the data and did the math, literally dropping a snapshot of the universe’s proportions. This image shows a reddish-brown dust cloud clustered along the Milky Way’s centerline and flooded with more than 3 billion lights. Nearly every star has a faint nearby galaxy here and there.
Based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the project is called the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey and aims to index objects in the plane of the galaxy. In January, the researcher announced his release of his second data. Astrophysical Journal Supplement SeriesThis is the largest catalog or index of stars ever collected by a single instrument, and one of the few instances where we have pointed our camera at the center of the galaxy. If so, it’s a cosmic selfie.
But while the stars are the focus of attention, another point of this investigation is to capture the elusive material that drifts between them: dust. Dust distorts our view of the universe because it obscures light. Knowing how much of it is in the outside world allows astronomers to filter out its effects from their data and measure the star’s chemistry and position more accurately. Over the next decade, scientists will use this catalog to create dust maps of our galaxy, track ancient star systems, and study the formation and structure of the Milky Way.
For this study, the research team repurposed the Dark Energy Camera, or DECam, an optical instrument at the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory in Chile originally built to study faint objects far from the galactic plane. I used it. “We took this instrument made for cosmology,” said Eddie Schlafly, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. and a nebula. ” According to him, the goal was to solve as many individual light sources as possible.
Most astronomers stray from observing galactic planes, which are notoriously difficult to image. “The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, so most of the stars are in a flat pancake,” says Andrew Saijari, a Harvard physics graduate student who led the study. Unfortunately for observers on Earth, we are sitting in the middle of that pancake. In a thin stellar haze disk, it’s easy to see above or below our plane. But peering into the center or outer edges of the galaxy is difficult due to the crowded field of view. “Sometimes it looks like a lot of stars are overlapping,” says Saijali.
Anything else hanging in the center of the galaxy is useless. For example, some gases are hot enough to emit their own photons that are similar in color to starlight. Dust can also cause objects to appear darker and redder than they really are. Both of these can skew astronomers’ measurements of stellar brightness and position.
