Cape Canaveral, Florida – A galactic image captures more than 3 billion stars and galaxies in one of the largest surveys of the sky.
The dark drive camera of a telescope in Chile made the observations for two years, focusing on the sky in the Southern Hemisphere. NOIRLab, the National Science Foundation, released the results of the survey this week.
Shown in great detail, most of these Milky Way objects are stars. The track also includes small, distant galaxies that may have been mistaken for individual stars.
It’s like taking a group shot, and we can distinguish not only the individual, but also the color of their shirt, said lead researcher Andrew Saydjari, a PhD student in physics at Harvard University.
“Despite spending many hours staring at images of tens of thousands of stars, I’m not sure my brain has wrapped around the size of these numbers,” Sedjari said in an email.
According to the researchers, this latest survey covers 6.5% of the night sky. It includes the results of a survey published in 2017 that ranked two billion celestial bodies, most of them stars.
With hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, the cosmic catalog will surely expand. Sedjari says there are no further updates to this survey, but upcoming telescopes will process larger areas of the sky.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Section is supported by the Science and Education Media Group of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. AP is solely responsible for all content.
