New Milky Way Survey Reveals 3.3 Billion Cosmic Objects In Our Home Galaxy
A new survey of the Milky Way galaxy has revealed 3.32 billion objects in our home galaxy. The survey, perhaps the largest of its kind, was created using data from the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
"Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable!" said Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the operator of the observatory.
"Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come," Fischer added.
Mapping the Milky Way galaxy
The Milky Way galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, giant nebulas where stars are born, and even bigger clouds of gas and dust. The team behind the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (or DECaPS2, as it's called) observed the galaxy's plane using optical and near-infrared wavelengths. ?
It took them two years to build this catalogue, amassing about 10 TB of data from 21,400 individual exposures of the southern sky.
Also read:?Scientists Map Giant Space Bubble That Is Home To Milky Way For The First Time
"One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other," said Andrew Saydjari, lead author of the study.
"Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed," added Saydjari, a graduate student at Harvard University.
A majority of the stars and dust are situated in the galactic plane in the Milky Way - visible as a bright band in the centre of new images.
The foundation of this catalogue of 3.32 billion objects is available to the general public as well. The survey's coverage of the night sky is now up to 6.5% - stretching to 130 degrees - which is about 13,000 times the angular size of the full moon, Space.com reported.
Also read:?Massive 'Extragalactic Structure' Found Lurking Behind The Milky Way
The study is available on ArXiv and has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
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References
Lea, R. (2023, January 18). 3.3 billion Milky Way objects revealed by colossal astronomical survey. Space.com. https://www.space.com/dark-energy-camera-milky-way-survey
