An astonishing number of celestial objects were captured in unprecedented detail by an instrument built by the United States Department of Energy at the NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The Dark Energy Camera was used for the second release of the DECam Plane Survey.
(Photo : Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory Summit, NSF's NOIRLab)
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 largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
Capturing 3 Billion Stars in a Panorama
According to a press release from Harvard and Smithsonian's Center for Astrophysics, a new galactic panorama has been captured that shows over 3 billion stars bristling among the wispy bands of dust in our galaxy, the Milky Way, using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) Instrument.
Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Researcher and Harvard University Graduate Student Andrew Saydjari led the paper as an author and explained the success of DECaPS2.
As the researchers pointed at a region with a high density of stars, the second survey became successful by producing the captured panoramic image. Saydjari added that they were very careful on identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other.
DECam Plane Survey
The captured panorama showed 3 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The survey used data that originated from the second release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey or DECaPS2, a survey of the plane of the Milky Way seen from the southern sky through optical and near-infrared wavelengths.
A data of 10 terabytes from 21,400 individual exposures were produced through this survey, which took two years for the researchers to conclude the study. Additionally, DECaPS2 is the largest catalog compiled to date, as it identified an approximate of 3.32 billion celestial objects.
As per NOIRLab's report on their website, the first data from DECaPS was originally released in 2017. It now covers 6.5% of the night sky with a staggering 130 degrees in length, as the new and previous data of the two surveys have been combined. It is considered 13,000 times bigger than the angular area of the full moon.
The DECaPS2 dataset is available to the entire scientific community, hosted by NOIRLab's Astro Data Lab. The lab was part of the Community Science and Data Center.
Dark Energy Camera
Interesting Engineering reported that the Dark Energy Camera was used to capture the panorama, which is one of the instruments on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory of NOIRLab's program.
CTIO is a collection of constellations of international astronomical telescopes perched in Chile, with an altitude of 2,200 meters or 7,200 feet. The loft vantage point of the camera gave the researchers a view of the southern celestial hemisphere.
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