It took two years—and 21,400 photos—to capture an astonishing view of your spiral galactic home, the Milky Way.
On Jan. 18, astronomers published a “gigantic” survey of the Milky Way (Opens in a new window) as part of an ambitious project called the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey. They captured this sight using an instrument called the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, perched 7,200 feet above sea level in Chile. The camera is mounted to a large telescope that stretches over 13 feet wide; in the end, it imaged a whopping 3.32 billion objects, most of them stars.
“It’s quite a technical achievement. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people, and every single person is recognizable!” Debra Fischer, director of the Division of Astronomical Sciences at the National Science Foundation, said in a statement. “Astronomers will be looking at this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships between federal agencies can achieve.”
SEE ALSO: Yes, there are 100 million black holes roaming our galaxy
There are probably over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way (Opens in a new window), so this panorama is a very detailed sample of the galaxy as seen from Earth’s southern hemisphere. Look:
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The first image below: This is the panorama containing about 3.32 billion objects. “Most of the stars and dust in the Milky Way reside in its disk — the bright band extending across this image — in which the spiral arms reside,” explained the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab (Opens in a new window), which operates large telescopes in USA and elsewhere.
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Bottom image: This is one part of the giant space panorama above. “This image, which is full of stars and dark clouds of dust, is a small snippet – just a stab – of the Complete Dark Energy Plane Survey (DECaPS2) of the Milky Way,” explains a NOIRLab press release (Opens in a new window).
A new, panoramic view of the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: DECaPS2 / DOE / FNAL / DECam / CTIO / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA // Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
Millions of stars. Where’s Waldo? Credit: DECaPS2 / DOE / FNAL / DECam / CTIO / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
And if you want more, there’s more. You can view the entire zoomable survey on the Legacy Survey Viewer website (Opens in a new window).
Our galaxy contains many stars, but it also contains giant regions of dust and gas. To peer through these obscuring regions of space, astronomers captured wavelengths of light invisible to the naked eye, called near-infrared. This type of light, which travels at longer wavelengths than visible light, can penetrate or pass through cosmic dust, revealing what lies beyond (the powerful James Webb Space Telescope also sees infrared light).
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These new images capture an almost incalculable number of stars. However, there are many things that we cannot see there, but we can imagine. Most stars have at least one planet, and many have different solar systems. This makes over a trillion exoplanets(Opens in a new window) only in our Milky Way galaxy.
Some of these planets may rain gems. Some may be ocean worlds. Others may be rocky Earth-sized planets. There is untold potential in our galaxy, a place teeming with glittering stars.
This story has been updated with additional information about the dark energy camera aircraft study.
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