And not even close to mapping it all
Astronomers have mapped over three billion objects shimmering in the Milky Way, providing the most detailed survey of our galaxy yet.
The project involved analysing images captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter aperture Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. A team of researchers carefully studied the images from over 21,400 individual exposures over two years to produce the DECaPS2 dataset containing over 10TB of data.
The Milky Way is a giant spinning jumbled mass of gas, dust, and stars held together by gravity and compressed into a pinwheel shape. Although the researchers identified 3.32 billion celestial objects, the DECaPS2 survey only captures a fraction of the spiral galaxy; it covers just 6.5 percent of the night sky as observed from a patch of the southern sky.
« This is quite a technical feat, » Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at the National Science Foundation, who helped fund the project, said in a statement.
