A new study conducted with the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECam) Has revealed 3.3 billion celestial objects in the Milky Wayafter 21 thousand 400 individual exhibitions during the last two years.
This investigation, according to a report by CNNis the largest catalog of objects in our galaxy to date, all thanks to DECam, located on the four-meter Víctor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory of the National Science Foundation in Chile.
The site’s telescopes are located at an altitude of approximately 2,200 meters and can observe the southern sky in great detail through visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light. The two DECam data releases cover 6.5% of the night sky.
A technical feat
Debra Fischer, director of the National Science Foundation’s division of astronomical sciences, said in a statement: “This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and each individual is recognizable”.
“Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships between federal agencies can accomplish.”.
An image shows the celestial objects captured by DECam, which includes stars and dust in the bright galactic disk of the Milky Way. The spiral arms of the galaxy also lie in this plane. Together, these bright features make observing the galactic plane of the Milky Way, where most of its disk-shaped mass lies, a difficult task.
The dark streaks of dust seen in the image obscure the starlight, while the brightness of star-forming regions makes it difficult to detect the individual brightness of celestial objects.
Using the Dark Energy Camera, the astronomers were able to peer through the dust of the galactic plane using near-infrared light and used a data processing method to mitigate the dimming effects of star-forming regions.
The results of the study may be used to better map the 3D structure of dust and stars in the galaxy.
