Over 3.3 billion celestial bodies in total.A new data set taken with a dark energy camera has been released | sorae portal site to the universe

This image captures the direction of Vela in the southern sky. The entire field of view of about 4 degrees both vertically and horizontally (about 8 times the apparent diameter of the full moon) is filled with countless stars and dark nebulae.

Conducted by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Institute of Optical and Infrared Astronomy (NOIRLab) using the Observatory “Dark Energy Camera (DECam)” from the Blanco 4m Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The second dataset “DECaPS2” of the “Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS)” has been released.

There are hundreds of billions of stars and celestial bodies such as various nebulae in the Milky Way galaxy. DECaPS is carrying out visible and near-infrared observations to catalog these objects distributed along the galactic plane (i.e., the Milky Way) of the Milky Way, and in 2017 the first data set, DECaPS, was published. Published.

[▲ An image of the entire vast area of ​​”DECaPS2″ stitched together by a dark energy camera. The 130-degree range from Sagittarius on the left to Taurus on the right was photographed in visible and near-infrared light (Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Image Processing : M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab))]

In the DECaPS2 released this time, further data has been added to the previously released DECaPS. The observed range is 130 degrees x 20 degrees from “Sagittarius” to “Taurus”, and if expressed in full moon, it is about 13,000 times wide, and about 3.32 billion celestial bodies are included. It is said that there is

According to NOIRLab, DECaPS2 generated more than 10 terabytes of data in 21,400 exposures, and it took two years to complete the dataset. Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student at Harvard University who led the research team that compiled the paper on DECaPS2, said it was the largest catalog ever created by a single camera in terms of the number of observed celestial objects.

In addition, Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), who is a member of the research team, completed a 360-degree panorama of the galactic plane by combining data obtained from another survey (Pan-STARRS1) with DECaPS2. and commented that they could map the three-dimensional structure of stars and dust in the Milky Way galaxy in greater detail than ever before.

[▲ A diagram showing the range of the image posted at the beginning. It turns out that it is only a part of the area observed by DECaPS2 (Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik; Image Processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin ( NSF’s NOIR Lab))]

As the name suggests, the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) is an observational device developed primarily for the study of dark energy. (3 square degrees) can be captured at once. Observations for the original purpose of dark energy research were carried out from 2013 to 2019. The images in this article were released by NOIRLab on January 18, 2023.

Source

• Image Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Image Processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
• NOIRLab – Billions of Celestial Objects Revealed in Gargantuan Survey of the Milky Way

Sentence/sorae editorial department