Sweeping New Milky Way Portrait Captures More Than 3 Billion Stars - CNET

How galore stars tin you number erstwhile you look up into the clear nighttime sky? Not astir arsenic galore arsenic the Dark Energy Camera successful Chile. Scientists released a survey of a information of our location Milky Way postulation that contains 3.32 cardinal celestial objects, including billions of stars. 

The National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) operates DECam arsenic portion of an observatory task successful Chile. The caller astronomical dataset is the 2nd merchandise from the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2). NOIRLab called it "arguably the largest specified catalog compiled to date" successful a connection connected Wednesday.

Casual viewers tin bask NOIRLab's smaller-resolution mentation of the survey that gives a sweeping overview. For those who similar to dive into the details, this web viewer lets you spell deeper connected the data.  

This wide portion of the Milky Way contains billions of celestial objects arsenic portion of the  Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey.

DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF's NOIRLab)

The camera utilized optical and near-infrared wavelengths of airy to spot stars, star-forming regions and clouds of state and dust. "Imagine a radical photograph of implicit 3 cardinal radical and each azygous idiosyncratic is recognizable," said Debra Fischer of the NSF. "Astronomers volition beryllium poring implicit this elaborate representation of much than 3 cardinal stars successful the Milky Way for decades to come." 

The survey looks astatine the Milky Way's disk, which appears arsenic a agleam set moving on the image. It's packed with stars and dust. There's truthful overmuch of some it tin beryllium hard to prime retired what's happening. Stars overlap. Dust hides stars. It took cautious information processing to benignant it each out.

"One of the main reasons for the occurrence of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed astatine a portion with an extraordinarily precocious density of stars and were cautious astir identifying sources that look astir connected apical of each other," said Harvard University postgraduate researcher Andrew Saydjari, pb writer of a paper connected the survey published successful The Astrophysical Journal this week.

Several cardinal stars whitethorn dependable similar a bonkers number, but it's conscionable a tiny driblet successful the galactic bucket. NASA estimates determination are astatine slightest 100 cardinal stars successful the Milky Way. The caller survey covers conscionable 6.5% of the nighttime entity arsenic seen from the Southern Hemisphere. 

DECaPS2 was an epic, multi-year task consisting of 21,400 idiosyncratic exposures and 10 terabytes of data. NOIRLab's description of the survey arsenic a "gargantuan astronomical information tapestry" is fitting. We've ne'er seen the Milky Way rather similar this before. It's beauteous and it's humbling.