BlocksInform
A new "black energy" camera in Chile captured an amazing picture of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new image reveals a massive three billion objects that were previously uncharted, according to a press statement.
The picture, taken by the camera of dark energy (decam) on the noirlab of the winning nsf m. The 4-metre Blanco telescope of the Inter-American Cerro Tololo Observatory (ctio) in Chile can be consulted online. Anyone can zoom in on the ten terabytes of data made up of 21,400 individual exposures.
Massive investigation into the Milky Way.
The impressive new image covers 13,000 times the surface of the full moon as seen from Earth and contains an enormous number of stars, nebulae and other recently discovered space objects.
"We simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other," explained Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student at Harvard University and lead author of a paper detailing the new observation in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. 'This has enabled us to produce the largest catalogue of its kind ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects we've seen."
Astronomers have released a giant survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way with data taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by @ENERGY, at @cerrotololo in Chile. https://t.co/eAmw2Sy4gz. Picture: decaps2/doe/etf/decam/ctio/noirlab/nsf/aura/f. Slawik/M. Zamani/D. de Martin pic.twitter.com/TwIBrz6twT
— NOIRLab (@NOIRLabAstro) January 18, 2023
The new image is the second release of the survey data to the black energy camera (DECaPS2), which has been compiled from two years of sightings of the Milky Way plan observed from the southern hemisphere. The observations were made in near-infrared wavelengths, much like the James Webb Space Telescope, which is able to peer through dust clouds and unveil the stellar nurseries hiding beneath.
It's quite a feat of technique. Imagine a group photo of more than three billion people and each person is recognizable,' said debra fischer, director of the Division of Astronomical Sciences at the National Scientific Foundation (nsf). Astronomers will study this comprehensive picture of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades."
Illuminating the dark energy's mysterious strength.
The DECam was constructed to conduct the Dark Energy Survey, which was conducted from 2013 to 2019. The Dark Energy Survey was, as the name implies, proposed in order to shed new light on dark energy, which is thought to be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.
DECam also recently produced a stunning 100-megapixel image of two galaxies interacting with each other and also helped astronomers detect a potentially hazardous 0.9-mile-wide asteroid hiding in the Sun's glare. The final image is now combined with data from other telescope surveys - including Panstarrs 1 - with the goal of developing a 360? Sweep view of the Milky Way disk.
