Astronomers create Milky Way panorama of more than 10TB with 3.3 billion objects

Astronomers have published a panorama of part of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The goal was to arrive at a dataset to visualize and categorize as many objects as possible, a total of 3.3 billion objects and a dataset of more than 10TB.

This is a major study of the Milky Way conducted by NOIRLab, the US National Center for Terrestrial, Nocturnal and Optical Astronomy. In 2017, the first dataset of the so-called Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey published and now the second publication published online. It took two years to complete this second part. It’s about more than 10TB of data from 21,400 individual recordings, identifying approximately 3.32 billion objects. It is not only about stars, but also about gas and dust clouds. According to the researchers, this is the largest catalog of its kind to date. Together with the data from 2017, the survey now covers 6.5 percent of the night sky and covers 130 degrees in longitude.

This collection was created with the Dark Energy Cameraa camera mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope which is located in Chile at an altitude of 2200 meters, about 500km north of Santiago. The currently published dataset is the result of a survey as seen from the southern hemisphere using wavelengths in the optical and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.

The researchers have limited their research to a part of the so-called galactic plane of the Milky Way. This region contains a very high density of stars, and the researchers say they have been very careful to identify objects that appear close to each other. According to them, this contributed to the great success of the research in the form of the large number of 3.32 billion objects found.

Most of the Milky Way’s stars and dust clouds are in the galactic plane. This disk can be recognized as a bright band in the sky that is easily visible to the naked eye on a clear, dark night without much light pollution. The researchers focused on part of this band. The spiral arms of the Milky Way are also part of the disk. The large amount of stars and dust makes the band attractive to photograph, but also difficult to study. The dark dust regions absorb starlight and block faint stars. There is also light from nebulae and gas clouds that can make measuring the brightness of individual objects difficult.