Astronomers have released a new survey of the Milky Way, which includes 3.3 billion celestial objects. (NOIRLab)
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ATLANTA — A new survey of the Milky Way galaxy has revealed 3.3 billion celestial objects.
Our galaxy is filled with hundreds of billions of stars, dark columns of dust and gas, and bright star nurseries where stars are born. Astronomers are now documenting those wonders in great detail through the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, which is taking 12,300 individual exposures over two years.
The survey, which marks the second release of data from the 2017 program, is the largest catalog of Milky Way objects. The Dark Energy Camera, located at the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, captured the survey data.
The telescopes there sit at an altitude of about 7,200 feet and can observe the southern sky abundantly through visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light. The two data are released by the Dark Energy Camera Plane Surveying 6.5% of the night sky. Astronomers will be able to use the data from the mission to better describe the 3D structure of the galaxy’s dust and stars.
“This is a very technical achievement. Imagine a photo of three billion people and every single one is recognizable,” said Debra Fischer, director of the division of astronomical sciences at the National Science Foundation, in a statement.
“Astronomers have been evaluating this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what companies through federal agencies can achieve.”
A new image showing celestial objects captured by the survey was released on Wednesday, which includes stars and dust across the bright Milky Way galaxy. The arms of the galaxy also lie in this plane. At the same time, such bright features make observing the Milky Way in the galactic plane – where most of the round mass lies – a difficult task.
The dusty brown streaks seen in the image of the dark stars, as they glow from the starry regions, stain the difficulty of the splendor of the particular celestial objects.
Using the Dark Energy Camera, astronomers were able to see through the dust of the galactic plane using near-infrared light and a data-processing method to mitigate the effects of dark star-forming regions.
The data set was shared in a study published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply showed it in a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear almost on top of each other,” author Andreas Saydjari, a. doctoral student at Harvard University and researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement.
“And so it allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
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