NSF’s NOIRLab releases colossal astronomical data tapestry displaying the majesty of our Milky Way in unprecedented detail. Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the large
and lead author of the paper. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way’s disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars,” said Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the paper describing DECaPS2 published in the.
This image, which is brimming with stars and dark dust clouds, is a small extract — a mere pinprick — of the full Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
“Since my work on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey two decades ago, I have been looking for a way to make better measurements on top of complex backgrounds,” said Douglas Finkbeiner, a professor at the Center for Astrophysics, co-author of the paper, and principal investigator behind the project. “This work has achieved that and more!”
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable!” says Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at NSF. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships across federal agencies can achieve.
DECam was originally built to carry out the Dark Energy Survey, which was conducted by the Department of Energy and the US National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2019.This dataset was presented in the paper “The Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey 2 : More Sky, Less Bias, and Better Uncertainties” to appear in theReference: “The Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey 2 : More Sky, Less Bias, and Better Uncertainties” by Andrew K. Saydjari, Edward F. Schlafly, Dustin Lang, Aaron M. Meisner, Gregory M.
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