Astronomers have published a panorama of part of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The goal was to come up with a dataset to visualize and classify as many objects as possible, with a total of 3.3 billion objects and a dataset of over 10 terabytes.

This is a major study of the Milky Way by NOIRLab, the US National Center for Terrestrial, Nighttime and Visual Astronomy. In 2017, the first dataset of the so-called Dark Energy Camera Survey was released published And now The second post published online. It took two years to complete this sequel. It is about more than 10 terabytes of data From 21,400 individual records, it identified approximately 3.32 billion items. It is not only about stars, but also about clouds of gas and dust. According to the researchers, this is the largest catalog of its kind to date. Together with the 2017 data, the survey now covers 6.5 percent of the night sky and covers 130 degrees in longitude.

This group was created with Dark energy cameracamera installed on Victor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope Which is located in Chile at an altitude of 2200 meters, about 500 kilometers north of Santiago. The currently published dataset is the result of a survey as seen from the Southern Hemisphere using wavelengths in the optical and near-infrared portions of the spectrum.

The researchers limited their research to a part of the so-called galactic plane of the Milky Way. This region contains a very high density of stars, and the researchers say they have been careful to identify objects that appear close to each other. According to them, this has contributed to the great success of the search in the form of a large number of the 3.32 billion objects found.

Most of the Milky Way’s stars and dust clouds are in the galactic plane. This disc is recognizable as a bright band in the sky that is easily visible to the naked eye on a clear, dark night without much light pollution. The researchers focused on part of this band. The Milky Way’s spiral arms are also part of the disk. The large amount of stars and dust makes the ensemble attractive to photograph, but also difficult to study. Dark dust regions absorb starlight and obscure the fainter stars. There is also light from nebulae and gas clouds that can make measuring the brightness of individual objects difficult.