“Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” spacecraft can fly around the galaxy thanks to detailed star maps to navigate faster than light ship. There is no comparable version of his Google Maps here on Earth. milky way galaxy —or at least, we did.
That’s because astronomers recently released a new, more detailed catalog of the Milky Way. DECaPS2, which includes 3.32 billion objects. Yes, that’s right: 3.32 a billionThe new catalog is the galaxy’s largest roadmap to date, bringing a deeper understanding of the complexity and nuances of the galaxy we live in..
“This is a huge technological feat. Imagine a group photo of over 3 billion people. Every individual is recognizable!” Debra Fisher, Director of Astronomical Sciences, NSF (National Science Foundation) In a statement, Mr. “Astronomers will peruse this detailed image of his more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come.”
Assembling the catalog was an unimaginably huge amount of work, Cerro Tololo Observatory of the Americas (CTIO) — Located at an altitude of 2,200 meters in Cerro Tololo, Chile — the observatory’s unique vantage point gave astronomers the opportunity to capture data from the southern hemisphere in great detail. The new catalog is now changing the perspective of scientists looking at the Milky Way because the data was collected from the Southern Hemisphere. The first round of data was released in 2017. In addition to the new data, the astronomer believes the new catalog covers his 6.5% of the night sky.
“One of the main reasons for DECaPS2’s success is that we were careful to simply point to regions of very high star density and identify sources that nearly overlap each other.” Andrew SaijariHarvard Graduate Student, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian In a statement, the first author of the paper. “This allowed us to create the largest catalog ever from a single camera in terms of the number of objects observed.”
“Astronomers rely on catalogs like this to extract and compress information in sky images about the galaxies we live in,” Saijali said. “For example, we can learn from them about the structure of galaxies, the distribution of galactic dust, and the formation of stars.”
When it comes to the Milky Way, most stars are in a disk that looks like the clumps of light you see in side-by-side photographs of galaxies (since they lie directly in the Milky Way, they are the only stars we can see). is a view of the spiral arms of our galaxy). The spiral makes for an iconic picture of our galaxy, but it’s more difficult to observe the galactic plane and analyze the vast number of stars. In fact, the Milky Way galaxy has 100 billion stars, and dust clouds have long prevented him from seeing the other side—until now.
“When combined with an image from panstars 1DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way’s disk, and even reaches into much fainter stars. can do.”
Saijali said in an email to Salon that the catalog will be an incredibly useful tool for astronomers.
“Astronomers rely on catalogs like this to extract and compress information in sky images about the galaxies we live in,” Saijali said. “For example, we can learn from them about the structure of galaxies, the distribution of galactic dust, and the formation of stars.”
Saijali added that he hopes people will understand that sometimes the unthinkable is possible in astronomy.
“I hope people will understand how much information is out there about our galaxy if we apply careful and rigorous statistical analysis,” Saijali said. The program was relatively small in terms of telescope time, but it pursued difficult problems in crowded, dense fields, and spent many hours developing careful software and statistics to make a big impact. was completed.”
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