Cape Canaveral, Florida – The galactic image captures more than 3 billion stars and galaxies in one of the largest surveys of the sky.
The telescope’s camera obscura command in Chile recorded the observations for two years, focusing on the skies in the southern hemisphere. The National Science Foundation NOIRLab released the results of the survey this week.
Shown in great detail, most of these Milky Way objects are stars. The trail also includes small, distant galaxies that may be mistaken for individual stars.
It’s like taking a group shot, and we can distinguish not only between individuals, but also the color of their shirt,” said lead researcher Andrew Saydjari, a physics doctoral student at Harvard University.
“Despite spending many hours staring at images of tens of thousands of stars, I’m not sure I can wrap my brain around the size of these numbers,” Sedjari said in an email.
According to the researchers, this latest survey covers 6.5% of the night sky. It includes the results of a survey published in 2017 that classified two billion celestial bodies, most of them stars.
With hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, the cosmic catalog will surely expand. Sedjari says there are no further updates to this survey, but upcoming telescopes will process larger regions of the sky.
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