How many stars can you count when you look? clear sky? Not nearly as many as the Energy Camera Obscura in Chile. Scientists have released a survey of the portion of our home Milky Way galaxy that contains 3.32 billion celestial objects, including billions of stars.
The National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) operates DECam as part of an observatory project in Chile. The new astronomical data is the second release from the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2). NOIRLab called it “arguably the largest modern such catalog compiled” in a statement on Wednesday.
Casual viewers can enjoy NOIRLab in a lower resolution version of the survey which provides a more detailed view. For those who like to focus on details, this web viewer allows you to dig deeper into the data.
This broad sweep of the Milky Way contains billions of celestial objects as part of the Dark Energy Camera Plan Survey.
DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
The camera uses optical and near-refracted wavelengths of light to spot stars, star regions, and nebulae of gas and dust. “Imagine taking a photo of over 3 billion people and being able to identify every single one,” said Debra Fischer of the NSF. “Astronomers will be evaluating this more detailed portrait of the more than 3 billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come.”
A view of the globe looks like the Milky Way, which runs like a ball of light across the image. It is full of stars and dust. It’s so hard to pick out both of these things. The stars overlapped. Dust hides the stars. It took careful data processing to sort it all out.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply showed up in a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear close to each other,” said Harvard University graduate researcher Andrea Saydjari, lead author of a paper from Bonn published this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
Several billion stars may sound like a bonkers number, but it’s a small drop in the galactic bucket. NASA estimates that there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The new survey covers only 6.5% of the night sky as seen from the Southern Hemisphere.
DECaPS2 was an epic, multi-year project consisting of 21,400 individual extractions and 10 terabytes of data. NOIRLab describes the survey as a “gargantuan series of astronomical data”. We’ve never seen the Milky Way quite like it before. It is beautiful and humble.
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