Astronomers release a ‘gargantuan’ survey of our Milky Way galaxy

Our majestic Milky Way and its colossal tapestry of some 3.32 billion celestial objects have been captured in unprecedented detail and shared with the world.

In what is arguably the largest catalog of its kind, the ‘gigantic’ survey shows hundreds of billions of stars, bright star-forming regions and towering dark clouds of dust and gas.

It took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures of our galaxy.

But despite its vastness, the survey only covers just 6.5 percent of the night sky.

Fascinating: In what is arguably the largest catalog of its kind, the ‘gigantic’ survey shows hundreds of billions of stars, bright star-forming regions and towering dark clouds of dust and gas.

The stunning sight was captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on a telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which sits at an altitude of 7,200 feet (2,200 m).

At such a high vantage point, it gives astronomers an unrivaled view of the southern celestial hemisphere, which allowed DECam to capture the southern galactic plane in such detail.

It works by recording images using five filters, each of which captures the sky in a different color of light.

The Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) is a catalog of the plane of the Milky Way as seen from the southern sky taken at optical and near-infrared wavelengths.

The first DECaPS data trove was published in 2017, and with the addition of the new data release, it now spans a staggering 130 degrees of longitude.

Most of the Milky Way’s stars and dust lie in its disk, the bright band that runs across this image, in which the spiral arms lie.

But while the mix of stars and dust produces beautiful images, it also makes it difficult to observe the galactic plane.

This is because the dark tendrils of dust seen streaking across the above image absorb starlight, completely blotting out fainter stars.

Not only that, but the light from the nebulae interferes with any attempt to measure the brightness of individual objects, while the sheer number of stars can sometimes overlap.

This makes it difficult to disentangle individual stars from their neighbors.

The astronomers overcame these challenges by using near-infrared wavelengths to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust.

They also used an innovative data processing approach, which allowed them to better predict the background behind each star.

It helped mitigate the effects of crowded nebulae and star fields in such large astronomical images, ensuring that the final catalog of processed data is more accurate.

“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply targeted a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful to identify the sources that appear almost on top of each other,” said Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student at University. from Harvard and lead author of the article.

Hard work: The survey took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures from our galaxy. But despite its vastness, the survey only covers just 6.5 percent of the night sky.

The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) is an instrument mounted on the 13-foot Victor M. Blanco Telescope (seen above) at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. DECam, which was built in part with funding from the US Department of Energy, is celebrating ten years of existence and is part of the Dark Energy Survey project looking for evidence of dark energy.

“Doing so allowed us to produce the largest catalog of its kind with a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”

Co-author Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-run Space Telescope Science Institute, said the result was “a three-dimensional structure of the stars and dust of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail.”

He added: “When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way’s disk, and reaches for much fainter stars in addition.”

Debra Fischer, director of the NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences, said astronomers would be “looking at this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come.”

She added: ‘This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every individual is recognizable!’

DECam was originally built to conduct the Dark Energy Study, which was conducted by the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2019.

Their goal was to search for evidence of dark energy, a phrase used by physicists to describe a mysterious “something” that is causing unusual things to happen in the universe.

The new research has been published in the Astrophysical Magazine Supplement.

WHAT IS DARK ENERGY?

Dark energy is a phrase used by physicists to describe a mysterious “something” that is causing unusual things to happen in the universe.

The universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter.

Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today.

The universe is not just expanding, but expanding faster and faster as time goes by,” Dr. Kathy Romer, a scientist with the Dark Energy Survey, told MailOnline, as illustrated in this NASA graphic.

So the expansion of the universe has not slowed down due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been speeding up.

Nobody expected this, nobody knew how to explain it. But something was triggering it.

“The universe is not just expanding, it’s expanding faster and faster as time goes by,” Dr Kathy Romer, a scientist with the Dark Energy Survey, told MailOnline.

“What we would expect is that the expansion would slow down as time goes on, because almost 14 billion years have passed since the Big Bang.”