3.3 Billion Celestial Objects Captured By New Survey Of The Milky Way

The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas.

Astronomers released new images of the Milky Way that offers an enormous slice of the galaxy, which included star clusters, clouds of cosmic dust and supermassive black hole. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects, according to CBS news. 

The data for this unprecedented survey was taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.

The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloguing these objects for the study is a herculean task, but a newly released astronomical dataset known as the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) reveals a staggering number of these objects in unprecedented detail. The DECaPS2 survey, which took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures, identified approximately 3.32 billion objects -- arguably the largest such catalogue compiled to date. Astronomers and the public can explore the dataset here, ANI reported.

This unprecedented collection was captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF's NOIRLab. CTIO is a constellation of international astronomical telescopes perched atop Cerro Tololo in Chile at an altitude of 2200 meters (7200 feet). CTIO's lofty vantage point gives astronomers an unrivalled view of the southern celestial hemisphere, which allowed DECam to capture the southern Galactic plane in such detail.