See The New 10-Terabyte Image Of Our Galaxy That Reveals Over Three Billion New Celestial Objects

A state-of-the art new “dark energy” camera in Chile has produced a stunning image of the galactic plane of the Milky Way that reveals over three billion objects.

The huge composite image—which comprises 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures—covers 13,000 times the area of the full Moon and identifies untold numbers of newly found stars, nebulae and dark clouds of dust and gas.

“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” said Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF). “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come.

Captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the NSF’s NOIRLab’s Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, the gigantic image can be zoomed-in on online.

It’s the result of the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2), which consists of two years of observations of the plane of the Milky Way as seen from the southern hemisphere.

The pin-sharp image of the busiest area of the galaxy was achieved by observing at near-infrared wavelengths, which allows astronomers to see fainter stars and also to peer right through dust clouds. That’s a linchpin of the success of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) space observatory.

“We simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” said Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student at Harvard University, researcher at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the paper published today in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”

The image is being combined with those from other survey telescopes—such as PanSTARRS 1—to produce a 360º panoramic view of the Milky Way’s disk. “With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way’s stars and dust in unprecedented detail,” said Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the paper.

The incredible image comes in the wake of two other landmark images from DECam—a stunning 100-megapixel image of two galaxies dramatically interacting with each other and a whopping 570-megapixel image of the “Lobster Nebula.”

Built between 2013 and 2019, DECam is being used for the Dark Energy Survey (DES), an astronomical survey designed to constrain the properties of dark energy, a somewhat mysterious force that astronomers think is causing the rate of expansion of our universe to accelerate.

DECam’s home , CTIO on Chile’s 7,200 feet/2,200 meters high Cerro Pachón mountaintop, which is is also now home to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (VRO). Expected to begin observing later this year, the VRO’s 10-year “Legacy Survey of Space and Time” (LSST) survey of the sky will image the entire southern hemisphere night sky every three nights, with each image covering an area 40 times the size of the full Moon.

The wide-angle observatory will alert astronomers to real-time events and construct a huge data archive. It’s expected to dramatically advance astronomers’ knowledge of the cosmos.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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