A photographic session of galaxies that captures 3 billion celestial bodies
A galaxy imaging session has captured more than 3 billion celestial bodies, in one of the largest space surveys ever.
In the details, a dark-energy camera mounted on a telescope located in Chile took pictures over a period of two years, focusing on the southern hemisphere sky.
The US National Science Foundation's Noirlab Center released the results of the survey this week, as the images show great detail, indicating that the majority of the Milky Way's bodies are stars, and the number also includes distant small galaxies that may have been confused with individual stars.
In this regard, the lead researcher of the study, Andrew Sedgari, a Ph.D. student in physics at Harvard University, explained, “It is like taking a group photo and being able to distinguish not only between each individual, but also the color of his shirt.”
He continued: “Despite the many hours of staring at images that contain tens of thousands of stars, I am not sure that my mind has grasped the magnitude of these numbers.”
According to the researchers, this latest survey now covers 6.5% of the night sky, including results from a survey published in 2017 that cataloged two billion celestial bodies, most of them stars.
Sedjari noted that there are no further updates to this particular survey, but that upcoming telescopes will address larger regions of the sky.
With hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, the cosmic picture book is likely to grow in size.
Source: websites