The new Milky Way portrait image captures more than 3 billion stars

How many stars can you count when you look up at Clear night sky? Not nearly as good as Chile’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 Science Foundation’s National Optical and Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) is working on DECam as part of an observatory project in Chile. The new astronomical dataset is the second version of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2). NOIRLab called it “It is arguably the largest catalog compiled to date,” said a statement released on Wednesday.

Casual viewers can enjoy NOIRLab A smaller, more accurate version of the survey Gives a comprehensive overview. For those who like to dive into the details, This web viewer It allows you to dig deeper into the data.

The camera used optical and near-infrared wavelengths of light to detect stars, star-forming regions, and clouds of gas and dust. “Imagine a group photo of more than 3 billion people and each individual can be recognised,” said Debra Fisher of the NSF. “Astronomers will look at this detailed picture of more than 3 billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come.”

The scan looks at the disk of the Milky Way, which appears as a bright band running the length of the image. It is full of stars and dust. There’s so much it can be hard to pin down what’s going on. The stars overlap. Dust hides the stars. It took careful data processing to sort everything out.

“One of the main reasons for DECaPS2’s success is that we simply pointed to a region with a very high density of stars, and were careful to identify the sources that appear almost on top of each other,” said the Harvard-educated researcher. Andrew Sedgarythe lead author of Paper on the survey published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.

Several billion stars may seem like a Bonkers 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 was an epic multi-year project consisting of 21,400 individual exposures and 10 terabytes of data. Description of NOIRLab The survey as a suitable “giant astronomical data tapestry”. We’ve never seen the Milky Way like this before. He is beautiful and he is humble.