New Image of the Milky Way's Galactic plane Reveals 3.32 billion Celestial Objects

The new image covers just 6.5% of the night sky and is made up of 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures captured by the Dark Energy Camera located at NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile , the image is made up from optical and near-infrared wavelength observations.

Most of the stars and dust in the Milky Way are located in its disk — the bright band stretching across this image — in which the spiral arms lie. While this profusion of stars and dust makes for beautiful images, it also makes the Galactic plane challenging to observe. The dark tendrils of dust seen threading through this image absorb starlight and blot out fainter stars entirely, and the light from diffuse nebulae interferes with any attempts to measure the brightness of individual objects. Another challenge arises from the sheer number of stars, which can overlap in the image and make it difficult to disentangle individual stars from their neighbors.
Zoomable image

To get a closer look at the sheer number of Stars astronomers have highlighted this region.


The closer look shows the staggering number of Stars from that one small part of our Galactic plane.

This image, which is brimming with stars and dark dust clouds, is a small extract — a mere pinprick — of the full Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) 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 US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American
Zoomable image

All of that from one small part of the Galactic plane in an average Galaxy in a Universe containing Billions of Galaxies , there are no words to describe just how small we and our little planet really are in the scale of creation and how lucky we are to live in a time where we can see the majesty spread out before us.

“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that 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,” said Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student at Harvard University, researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the paper. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”

“When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way's disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars,” said Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the paper describing DECaPS2 published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. “With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way's stars and dust in unprecedented detail.”

“Since my work on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey two decades ago, I have been looking for a way to make better measurements on top of complex backgrounds," said Douglas Finkbeiner, a professor at the Center for Astrophysics, co-author of the paper, and principal investigator behind the project. “This work has achieved that and more!"

“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable!” says Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at NSF. “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 across federal agencies can achieve.”
www.noirlab.edu...

I zoomed in on the second picture and it's just mind-blowing, what a trip. Thank you for posting this wonder.

First one looks like a kitchen worktop

Yeah, but we are all alone...and if we are not we are the most intelligent out there.

Thanks for posting, Gortex. Space should be renamed.

Thank you for posting this. Perspective is a frightening and also amazingly beautiful thing.

"The new image covers just 6.5% of the night sky and is made up of 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures"

Too much information!
I know I often whinge about modern technology or its misuse-but imagine trying to stitch that image together in old school fashion,with individual negatives in the dark room..

Crazy that there is another 93.5% of sky with that same density of stars.

Someone should tell that ChatGP AI thing to run all kinds of spectral analysis on each point of light in the image,see what it comes up with.

a reply to: gortex

for me it always feels like there is a connection. a longing. maybe because the ingredients for life probably come from there.

anyway, thanks for posting!

originally posted by: malte85
a reply to: gortex

for me it always feels like there is a connection. a longing. maybe because the ingredients for life probably come from there.

anyway, thanks for posting!

Ummm...I agree...there's a deep seated longing...almost a compulsion to be...out there...I long to see them all...up front and personal...I wish to place my footprints on every planet or planetesimal...to pick up their dirt in my hands...to possibly examine the life that may be extant...to observe everything...in all directions...

I belong...out there...



YouSir

originally posted by: malte85
a reply to: gortex

for me it always feels like there is a connection. a longing. maybe because the ingredients for life probably come from there.

anyway, thanks for posting!

We are star stuff!
-Carl Sagan

I always felt that too. Nothing like looking up and feeling yourself floating on a rock through space and time...

Cool CGI.

Sat staring at those pictures for probably an hour just thinking, to see all that and to then hear so many people say nope we are the smartest creatures in the universe.

Makes me laugh, forget religion statistically there is some spec in those pictures that has intelligent life on it, may not be life as we know it but something thinking feeling and acting with a purpose.

I just had to take a second look, a second trip 'out there'. I think I'll hang out here for a while.

a reply to: gortex

Re: www.noirlab.edu...

It's like looking down into a bucket of sand. Everything is so dense, round, and only slightly varying in color, except for the black dust clouds.

Could we survive if Earth were to magically be transported to that dense part of the Milky Way galaxy?

It seems we'd be bombarded by radiation, flares, and under constant threat from catastrophic collisions.

What blows my mind is that there are close-minded people who still believe we are alone in the universe.

If you truly believe in God, you have to accept that God in all his/her wonder would not limit his greatness to just one lonely little planet. This to me proves that there is a higher power.

The scale is truly mindboggling.
The notion we are the only planet with life on it is just ludicrous.