Milky Way photo captures 3 billion stars
Cape Canaveral, Florida: A galactic photoshoot captured more than 3 billion stars and galaxies in one of the largest all-sky surveys ever.
A dark-energy camera on a telescope in Chile conducted the observations over two years, focusing on southern hemisphere skies. The US National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab released the survey results on Thursday.
The new Milky Way dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects. Here, a low-resolution image of the data on the right is overlaid on an image showing the entire sky. The box on the left is a full resolution view of a small portion of the data. Credit:NOIRLab
Most of the objects in the Milky Way that are shown in remarkable detail are stars. The census also includes small, distant galaxies that may have been mistaken for individual stars.
It’s like taking a group picture and not only being able to distinguish each individual but also the color of their shirt, said lead researcher Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student in physics at Harvard University.
“Despite many hours of staring at images with tens of thousands of stars, I’m not sure I grasped the magnitude of those numbers,” Saydjari said.
The galactic plane of the Milky Way.Credit:NOIRLab/AP
This latest survey now covers 6.5 percent of the night sky, according to the researchers. It contains the results of a survey published in 2017 that cataloged 2 billion celestial objects, mostly stars.
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With hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, the cosmic catalog is sure to grow. No further updates are planned for this particular survey, Saydjari said, but upcoming telescopes would target even larger areas of the sky.
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/milky-way-photo-shoot-captures-3-billion-stars-20230120-p5ce7d.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_world Milky Way photo captures 3 billion stars
