How many stars can you count when you look up Clear night sky? Not as good as Chili’s Dark Energy Camera. Scientists have released a survey of a part of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which contains 3.32 billion celestial bodies, including billions of stars.
The National Research Laboratory for Optical and Infrared Astronomy (NOIRLab) of the National Science Foundation is working on DECam as part of an observatory project in Chile. The new astronomical data set is the second version of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2). NOIRLab calls it “This is arguably the largest catalog compiled to date,” said a statement released on Wednesday.
Regular viewers can enjoy NOIRLab Poll version with lower resolution Gives a comprehensive picture. For those who like to dive into the details, this web viewer This allows you to dig deeper into the data.
This wide band of the Milky Way contains billions of celestial bodies as part of the Dark Energy Camera’s jet survey.
DECaPS2 / DOE / FNAL / DECam / CTIO / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / M. Zamani dan De Martin (NOIRLab NSF)
The camera uses optical and near-infrared wavelengths of light to detect stars, star-forming regions, and clouds of gas and dust. “Imagine a group photo of over 3 billion people and every individual is identifiable,” says NSF’s Debra Fisher. “Astronomers will see detailed images of more than 3 billion stars in the Milky Way over the coming decades.”
The scans see the Milky Way’s disk, which appears as a bright band that runs across the image. It is full of stars and dust. There’s so much going on that it’s hard to pin down. The stars overlap. The dust hides the stars. It took careful data processing to get everything done.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we only pointed to regions of very high stellar density, and carefully identified sources that appeared almost on top of one another,” said a Harvard-trained researcher. Andrew Sedgarymain author of A paper about the survey is published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.
A few billion stars may seem like a crazy number, but they are just a small drop in the galactic bucket. NASA estimates 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 is an epic multi-year project consisting of 21,400 individual exposures and 10 terabytes of data. Description of NOIR Lab Surveys as a suitable “giant astronomical data rug”. We’ve never seen the Milky Way like this before. She is beautiful and she is humble.
