Say cheese! Galactic photo shoot captures 3 billion stars - ABC News

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A galactic photograph sprout has captured much than 3 cardinal stars and galaxies successful 1 of the biggest entity surveys ever.

A dark-energy camera connected a scope successful Chile made the observations implicit 2 years, focusing connected the Southern Hemisphere sky. The National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab released the survey results this week.

Shown successful singular detail, astir of these Milky Way objects are stars. The number besides includes small, distant galaxies that whitethorn person been mistaken arsenic idiosyncratic stars.

It’s similar taking a radical changeable and being capable to separate not lone each individual, but the colour of their shirt, said pb researcher Andrew Saydjari, a doctoral campaigner successful physics astatine Harvard University.

“Despite galore hours of staring astatine images containing tens of thousands of stars, I americium not definite my caput has wrapped astir the magnitude of these numbers," Saydjari said successful an email.

This latest survey present covers 6.5% of the nighttime sky, according to the researchers. It includes the results of a survey released successful 2017 that catalogued 2 cardinal celestial objects, mostly stars.

With hundreds of billions of stars successful the Milky Way, the cosmic catalog is definite to grow. No further updates are planned for this peculiar survey, Saydjari said, but upcoming telescopes volition tackle adjacent larger areas of the sky.

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