You can count the number of stars when you look up clear night sky? Not as many as Chile’s dark energy cameras.? Scientists have released findings from a portion of our Milky Way galaxy, which contains 3.32 billion objects containing billions of stars.
The National Science Foundation’s National Institute of Optical and Infrared Astronomy (NOIRLab) operates DECam as part of the Chilean Observatory Project. The new astronomical dataset is his second release from the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2). NOIRLab called it In a statement Wednesday, it is “arguably the largest such catalog ever compiled.”
For casual viewers, NOIRLab Low resolution version of survey It provides a sweeping overview. For more information, This web viewer Dig deeper into your data.
This broad band of the Milky Way contains billions of objects as part of the Dark Energy Camera Planar Survey.
DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
The camera used light at optical and near-infrared wavelengths to find stars, star-forming regions, and clouds of gas and dust. “Imagine a group photo of over 3 billion people. Every individual is identifiable,” said Debra Fisher of the NSF. We will be scrutinizing this detailed image of stars over .
The survey looks at the Milky Way disk, which appears as a bright band running along the image. It is chock full of stars and dust. There are so many of both that it’s hard to pinpoint what’s going on. stars overlap. Dust hides stars. It took careful data processing to get it all sorted.
“One of the main reasons for DECaPS2’s success was that we were careful to simply point out regions of very high star density and identify sources that nearly overlapped with each other,” says Harvard’s Harvard University. graduate researcher said. Andrew Saijarifirst author of Research paper published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.
Billions of stars may sound like a silly number, but it’s just a tiny drop in the galaxy’s bucket. NASA estimates The Milky Way has at least 100 billion stars. The new survey covers just 6.5% of the night sky as seen from the Southern Hemisphere.
DECaPS2 was an epic multi-year project with 21,400 individual exposures and 10 terabytes of data. Description of NOIRLab A description of the survey as “a huge tapestry of astronomical data” is apt. I have never seen the Milky Way like this before. It’s beautiful and humble.
