Tanjung Canaveral, Florida – The galaxy imaging session has captured more than 3 billion stars and galaxies in one of the largest sky surveys ever.
A dark-powered camera on a telescope in Chile kept observations for two years, focusing on the southern hemisphere sky. NOIRLab of the National Science Foundation released the survey results this week.
Rendered in great detail, most of these Milky Way objects are stars. The number also includes small and distant galaxies that might be mistaken for individual stars.
It’s like taking a group picture and being able to distinguish not only each individual, but also the color of their clothes, said lead researcher Andrew Saydjari, a PhD student in physics at Harvard University.
“Despite hours of staring at a picture containing tens of thousands of stars, I’m not sure I’ve ever racked my brain for the size of those numbers,” Sedjari said in an email.
This latest survey now covers 6.5% of the night sky, according to the researchers. That 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 is bound to grow. There will be no further updates to this particular survey, Sedjari said, but future telescopes will process a wider region of the sky.
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