- The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is spinning so fast, it’s squishing space-time down like a football Yahoo News
- Our galaxy’s black hole spins fast and drags space-time with it, scientists say CNN
- Supermassive black hole in our galaxy spinning rapidly, altering space-time around it: Scientists WION
- Milky Way Black Hole Spinning so Fast, It’s Squishing Space-Time Like a Football Business Insider
- The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is spinning so fast, it’s squishing space-time down like a footb Business Insider India
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Milky
Lackluster supernova reveals a rare pair of stars in the Milky Way
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
CNN
—
An unusual star system created more of a fizz and less of a bang when it exploded in a supernova.
The lackluster explosion, known as an “ultra-stripped” supernova, led researchers to discover the two stars 11,000 light-years away from Earth.
It’s the first confirmed detection of a star system that will one day create a kilonova – when neutron stars collide and explode, releasing gold and other heavy elements into space. The rare stellar pair is believed to be one of only about 10 like it in the Milky Way galaxy.
The discovery was a long time coming.
In 2016, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected a large flash of X-ray light, which originated from the same region in the sky where a hot, bright Be-type star was located.
Astronomers were curious if the two could potentially be linked, so data was captured using the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory’s 1.5-meter telescope in northern Chile.
One of those interested in using this data to learn more about the star was Dr. Noel D. Richardson, now an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
In 2019, Clarissa Pavao, an undergraduate student at the university, approached Richardson while taking his astronomy class to ask if he had any projects she could work on to gain experience with astronomy research. He shared the telescope data with her and throughout the pandemic, Pavao learned how to work with the data from the telescope in Chile and clean it up to reduce distortion.
“The telescope looks at a star and it takes in all the light so that you can see the elements that make up this star — but Be stars tend to have disks of matter around them,” Pavao said. “It’s hard to see directly through all that stuff.”
She sent her initial results — which resembled something like a scatterplot — to Richardson, who recognized that she had pinned down an orbit for the double-star system. Follow-up observations helped them verify the orbit of the binary star system, named CPD-29 2176.
But that orbit wasn’t what they were expecting. Typically, binary stars whirl around one another in an oval-shaped orbit. In CPD-29 2176, one star orbits the other in a circular pattern that repeats about every 60 days.
The two stars, a larger one and a smaller one, were whirling around one another in a very close orbit. Over time, the larger star had begun to shed its hydrogen, releasing material onto the smaller star, which grow from 8 or 9 times the mass of our sun to 18 or 19 times the mass of our sun, Richardson said. For comparison’s sake, our sun’s mass is 333,000 times that of Earth.
The main star became smaller and smaller while building up the secondary star — and by the time it had exhausted all of its fuel, there wasn’t enough to create a massive, energetic supernova to release its remaining material into space.
Instead, the explosion was like lighting a dud firework.
“The star was so depleted that the explosion didn’t even have enough energy to kick (its) orbit into the more typical elliptical shape seen in similar binaries,” Richardson said.
What remained after the ultra-stripped supernova was a dense remnant known as a neutron star, which now orbits the rapidly rotating massive star. The stellar pair will remain in a stable configuration for about 5 to 7 million years. Because both mass and angular momentum were transferred to the Be star, it releases a disk of gas to maintain balance and make sure it doesn’t rip itself apart.
Eventually, the secondary star will also burn through its fuel, expand and release material like the first one did. But that material can’t be easily piled up on the neutron star, so instead, the star system will release the material through space. The secondary star will likely experience a similar lackluster supernova and turn into a neutron star.
Over time — that is, likely a couple billion years — the two neutron stars will merge and eventually explode in a kilonova, releasing heavy elements like gold into the universe.
“Those heavy elements allow us to live the way that we do. For example, most gold was created by stars similar to the supernova relic or neutron star in the binary system that we studied. Astronomy deepens our understanding of the world and our place in it,” Richardson said.
“When we look at these objects, we’re looking backward through time,” Pavao said. “We get to know more about the origins of the universe, which will tell us where our solar system is headed. As humans, we started out with the same elements as these stars.”
A study detailing their findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Richardson and Pavao also worked with physicist Jan J. Eldridge at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, an expert on binary star systems and their evolution. Eldridge reviewed thousands of binary star models and estimated there are likely only 10 in the entirety of the Milky Way galaxy similar to the one in their study.
Next, the researchers want to work on learning more about the Be star itself, and hope to conduct follow-up observations using the Hubble Space Telescope. Pavao is also setting her sights on graduating — and continuing to work on space physics research using the new skills she has acquired.
“I never thought I would be working on the evolutionary history of binary star systems and supernovas,” Pavao said. “It’s been an amazing project.”
The Milky Way Is Too Big for Its “Cosmological Wall”
A lonely Milky Way analog galaxy, too massive for its wall. The background image shows the distribution of dark matter (green and blue) and galaxies (here seen as tiny yellow dots) in a thin slice of the cubic volume in which we expect to find one of such rare massive galaxies. Credit: Images: Miguel A. Aragon-Calvo, Simulation Data: Illustris TNG project (CC BY 4.0)
Milky Way Discovered To Be More Unique Than Previously Thought
Is the
Typically, galaxies tend to be significantly smaller than this so-called wall. The Milky Way is found to be surprisingly massive in comparison to its cosmological wall, a rare cosmic occurrence.
A Milky Way Analogue sitting at the center of a flat wall of smaller galaxies (grey spheres). The blue circles indicate distance from the Milky Way Analogue in 1 Mpc intervals. The background image shows the distribution of dark matter (green and blue) and galaxies (here seen as tiny yellow dots) in a thin slice of the cubic volume in which we expect to find one of such rare massive galaxies. Credit: Images: Miguel A. Aragon-Calvo, Simulation Data: Illustris TNG project (CC BY 4.0)
The new findings are based on a state-of-the-art computer simulation, part of the IllustrisTNG project. The team simulated a volume of the Universe nearly a billion light-years across that contains millions of galaxies. Only a handful – about a millionth of all the galaxies in the simulation – were as “special” as the Milky Way, i.e. both embedded in a cosmological wall like the Local Sheet, and as massive as our home galaxy.
According to the team, it may be necessary to take into account the special environment around the Milky Way when running simulations, to avoid a so-called “Copernican bias” in making scientific inference from the galaxies around us. This bias, describing the successive removal of our special status in the nearly 500 years since Copernicus demoted the Earth from being at the center of the cosmos, would come from assuming that we reside in a completely average place in the Universe. To simulate observations, astronomers sometimes assume that any point in a simulation such as 
The Local Sheet, a flat wall of galaxies surrounding the Milky Way (indicated by a spiral pattern). The blue circles indicate distance from the Milky Way in 1 Mpc intervals. Credit: Images: Miguel A. Aragon-Calvo, Simulation Data: Illustris TNG project
“So, the Milky Way is, in a way, special,” said research lead Miguel Aragón. “The Earth is very obviously special, the only home of life that we know. But it’s not the center of the Universe, or even the Solar System. And the Sun is just an ordinary star among billions in the Milky Way. Even our galaxy seemed to be just another spiral galaxy among billions of others in the observable Universe.”
“The Milky Way doesn’t have a particularly special mass, or type. There are lots of spiral galaxies that look roughly like it,” Joe Silk, another of the researchers, said. “But it is rare if you take into account its surroundings. If you could see the nearest dozen or so large galaxies easily in the sky, you would see that they all nearly lie on a ring, embedded in the Local Sheet. That’s a little bit special in itself. What we newly found is that other walls of galaxies in the Universe like the Local Sheet very seldom seem to have a galaxy inside them that’s as massive as the Milky Way.”
A Local Sheet Analogue in the Illustris TNG300 simulation, a flat wall of galaxies surrounding a Milky Way Analogue galaxy (large sphere at the center). The blue circles indicate distance from the central galaxy in 1 Mpc intervals. Credit: Images: Miguel A. Aragon-Calvo, Simulation Data: Illustris TNG project
“You might have to travel a half a billion light years from the Milky Way, past many, many galaxies, to find another cosmological wall with a galaxy like ours,” Aragón said. He adds, “That’s a couple of hundred times farther away than the nearest large galaxy around us, Andromeda.”
“You do have to be careful, though, choosing properties that qualify as ‘special,’” Dr. Mark Neyrinck, another member of the team, said. “If we added a ridiculously restrictive condition on a galaxy, such as that it must contain the paper we wrote about this, we would certainly be the only galaxy in the observable Universe like that. But we think this ‘too big for its wall’ property is physically meaningful and observationally relevant enough to call out as really being special.”
Reference: “The unusual Milky Way-local sheet system: implications for spin strength and alignment” by M A Aragon-Calvo, Joseph Silk and Mark Neyrinck, 23 December 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slac161
Astronomers Just Realized The Milky Way Is Too Big For Its Surroundings : ScienceAlert
Our home, the Milky Way, doesn’t seem particularly odd for a galaxy. Moderately-sized, spiral in shape, with a few kinks suggestive of a disruptive past.
But astronomers have just identified a quirk never before seen in any galaxy studied to date: the Milky Way is too big for its surroundings.
Specifically, it appears to be too large for the neighborhood it sits within known as the Local Sheet. This flattened arrangement of galaxies share similar velocities, bounded by relatively empty space called voids on either side.
Our Local Sheet, as an example of a ‘cosmological wall’, separates the Local Void in one direction from the Southern Void in the other.
The relationship between the galaxies in the Local Sheet seems to exert a strong influence over their behavior; for example, their similar velocities relative to the expansion of the Universe. Outside of the cosmological wall environment, these velocities would have a much wider range.
To determine the effect the environment has on the galaxies around us, a team of astronomers led by Miguel Aragón of the National Autonomous University of Mexico conducted an analysis using simulations from a project called IllustrisTNG, which models the physical Universe.
They weren’t expecting to find anything particularly out of the ordinary.
“The Milky Way is, in a way, special,” Aragón says. “Earth is very obviously special, the only home of life that we know. But it’s not the center of the Universe, or even the Solar System. And the Sun is just an ordinary star among billions in the Milky Way. Even our galaxy seemed to be just another spiral galaxy among billions of others in the observable Universe.”
But when they simulated a volume of space about a billion light-years across containing millions of galaxies, a different picture emerged: just a scant handful of galaxies as massive as the Milky Way could be located within a cosmological wall structure.
“The Milky Way doesn’t have a particularly special mass, or type. There are lots of spiral galaxies that look roughly like it,” says astronomer Joe Silk of Sorbonne University’s Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris in France.
“But it is rare if you take into account its surroundings. If you could see the nearest dozen or so large galaxies easily in the sky, you would see that they all nearly lie on a ring, embedded in the Local Sheet. That’s a little bit special in itself. What we newly found is that other walls of galaxies in the Universe like the Local Sheet very seldom seem to have a galaxy inside them that’s as massive as the Milky Way.”
The team’s analysis didn’t take into account Andromeda, the Milky Way’s largest galactic neighbor. Also a feature of the Local Sheet – and therefore a part of the same cosmological wall – it’s a galaxy of a similar size to the Milky Way. Since having two heavyweights in a cosmological wall would be even rarer still, their conclusions still apply.
However, the research does highlight that we might need to consider our local environment when studying the Milky Way, rather than assuming that our home hangs out in an average way in an average spot in the Universe.
Because the team’s simulations only considered the Milky Way’s context within a cosmological wall, perhaps future work could account for more galaxies within the Local Group. The researchers also note that the environmental context could help explain some previously unexplained phenomena, such as the unusual arrangement of satellite galaxies around Andromeda, and the peculiar lack of them around the Milky Way.
“You do have to be careful … choosing properties that qualify as ‘special’,” says astronomer Mark Neyrinck of the Basque Foundation for Science in Spain.
“If we added a ridiculously restrictive condition on a galaxy, such as that it must contain the paper we wrote about this, we would certainly be the only galaxy in the observable Universe like that. But we think this ‘too big for its wall’ property is physically meaningful and observationally relevant enough to call out as really being special.”
The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Sweeping New Milky Way Portrait Captures More Than 3 Billion Stars
How many stars can you count when you look up into the clear night sky? Not nearly as many as the Dark Energy Camera in Chile. Scientists released a survey of a portion of our home Milky Way galaxy that contains 3.32 billion celestial objects, including billions of stars.
The National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) operates DECam as part of an observatory project in Chile. The new astronomical dataset is the second release from the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2). NOIRLab called it “arguably the largest such catalog compiled to date” in a statement on Wednesday.
Casual viewers can enjoy NOIRLab’s smaller-resolution version of the survey that gives a sweeping overview. For those who like to dive into the details, this web viewer lets you go deeper on the data.
This wide strip of the Milky Way contains billions of celestial objects as part of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey.
DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
The camera used optical and near-infrared wavelengths of light to spot stars, star-forming regions and clouds of gas and dust. “Imagine a group photo of over 3 billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” said Debra Fischer of the NSF. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than 3 billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come.”
The survey looks at the Milky Way’s disk, which appears as a bright band running along the image. It’s packed with stars and dust. There’s so much of both it can be hard to pick out what’s happening. Stars overlap. Dust hides stars. It took careful data processing to sort it all out.
“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 Harvard University graduate researcher Andrew Saydjari, lead author of a paper on the survey published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.
Several billion stars may sound like a bonkers number, but it’s just a small drop in the galactic bucket. NASA estimates there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The new survey covers just 6.5% of the night sky as seen from the Southern Hemisphere.
DECaPS2 was an epic, multi-year project consisting of 21,400 individual exposures and 10 terabytes of data. NOIRLab’s description of the survey as a “gargantuan astronomical data tapestry” is fitting. We’ve never seen the Milky Way quite like this before. It’s beautiful and it’s humbling.
The Latest Milky Way Survey Shows Off an Incredible 3.32 Billion Celestial Objects : ScienceAlert
If you check in regularly to ScienceAlert, you’ll be familiar with quite a few stunning space images, but a newly published picture has to be one of the best yet: 2 years in the making, 10 terabytes worth of data, 21,400 individual exposures combined, and a final image showing a huge 3.32 billion celestial objects.
We have the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to thank for this beautiful shot of space, part of the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), some 2,200 meters (7,218 feet) above sea level in Chile.
The image was issued as part of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2), and it gives us more detail than ever before of this part of space – it accounts for around 6.5 percent of the entire night sky, focusing on the galactic plane of the Milky Way where the bulk of the galaxy’s mass is located.
“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,” says astronomer Andrew Saydjari from Harvard University in Massachusetts.
“Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
That high density brings with it a few issues: The vast swaths of space dust and the glow from brighter stars can block out the light from dimmer objects entirely. By measuring both optical and near-infrared wavelengths, DECam overcomes these problems.
The team also used a special data processing technique to better estimate how the background of each star should look, enabling more stars to be observed with greater clarity, and improving the overall accuracy of the picture.
When combined with other sky surveys – like the Pan-STARRS project – the latest telescope technology provides us an unprecedented look at the Universe outside of our planet, which of course, gives us clues as to how it came into being.
“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,” says astronomer Edward Schlafly from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland.
“With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way’s stars and dust in unprecedented detail.”
The results are simply fantastic and very much worth the two-year wait. The data collected in the survey is freely available for other researchers and the wider public to make use of.
DECam was built initially to carry out a Dark Energy Survey and to better understand this mysterious force that is thought to be driving the Universe. It continues to produce amazingly detailed pictures of deep space, and there will be plenty more to come.
“This is quite a technical feat,” says astronomer Debra Fischer from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US, who wasn’t directly involved in the research. “Imagine a group photo of over three billion people, and every single individual is recognizable!”
“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.”
The research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
Dark Energy Camera Unveils Billions of Celestial Objects in Unprecedented Survey of the Milky Way
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
NSF’s NOIRLab releases colossal astronomical data tapestry displaying the majesty of our Milky Way in unprecedented detail.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the 
The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloging these objects for 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 catalog compiled to date. Astronomers and the public can explore the dataset here.
This unprecedented collection was captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Víctor 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 unrivaled view of the southern celestial hemisphere, which allowed DECam to capture the southern Galactic plane in such detail.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane 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 Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab. The survey is here reproduced in 4000-pixels resolution to be accessible on smaller devices. Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
DECaPS2 is a survey of the plane of the Milky Way as seen from the southern sky taken at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. The first trove of data from DECaPS was released in 2017, and with the addition of the new data release, the survey now covers 6.5% of the night sky and spans a staggering 130 degrees in length. While it might sound modest, this equates to 13,000 times the angular area of the full Moon.
The DECaPS2 dataset is available to the entire scientific community and is hosted by NOIRLab’s Astro Data Lab, which is part of the Community Science and Data Center. Interactive access to the imaging with panning/zooming inside of a web-browser is available from the Legacy Survey Viewer, the World Wide Telescope, and Aladin.
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.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane 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 Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab. For reference, a low-resolution image of the DECaPS2 data is overlaid on an image showing the full sky. The callout box is a full-resolution view of a small portion of the DECaPS2 data. Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik, Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
Despite the challenges, astronomers delved into the Galactic plane to gain a better understanding of our Milky Way. By observing at near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust. The researchers also used an innovative data-processing approach, which allowed them to better predict the background behind each star. This helped to mitigate the effects of nebulae and crowded star fields on such large astronomical images, ensuring that the final catalog of processed data is more accurate.
“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.”
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 Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab. Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
“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.”
DECam was originally built to carry out the Dark Energy Survey, which was conducted by the Department of Energy and the US National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2019.
More information
This dataset was presented in the paper “The Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey 2 (DECaPS2): More Sky, Less Bias, and Better Uncertainties” to appear in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
Reference: “The Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey 2 (DECaPS2): More Sky, Less Bias, and Better Uncertainties” by Andrew K. Saydjari, Edward F. Schlafly, Dustin Lang, Aaron M. Meisner, Gregory M. Green, Catherine Zucker, Ioana Zelko, Joshua S. Speagle, Tansu Daylan, Albert Lee, Francisco Valdes, David Schlegel and Douglas P. Finkbeiner, 18 January 2023, Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4365/aca594
The DECaPS2 team is composed of A. K. Saydjari (Harvard University and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), E. F. Schlafly (Space Telescope Science Institute), D. Lang (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and
Stunning view of Milky Way galaxy released by scientists
It took two years — and 21,400 shots — to capture an astonishing view of your spiraled galactic home, the Milky Way.
On Jan. 18, astronomers released a “gargantuan” survey of the Milky Way(Opens in a new window) as part of an ambitious project called the “Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey.” They captured this view using an instrument called the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, perched at 7,200 feet of elevation in Chile. The camera is mounted to a large telescope that spans over 13 feet wide; ultimately it snapped images of a whopping 3.32 billion objects, most of which are stars.
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable!” Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at National Science Foundation, said in a statement. “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.”
SEE ALSO:
Yes, there are 100 million rogue black holes wandering our galaxy
There are likely over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way(Opens in a new window), so this panorama is a deeply detailed sample of the galaxy as seen from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere. Take a look:
-
The first image below: This is the panorama containing some 3.32 billion objects. “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,” explained National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, which runs big telescopes across the U.S. and elsewhere.
-
The bottom image: This is one part of the giant cosmic panorama above. “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,” a NOIRLab press release explains(Opens in a new window).
A new, panoramic view of the Milky Way galaxy.
Credit: DECaPS2 / DOE / FNAL / DECam / CTIO / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA // Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
Millions of stars. Where’s Waldo?
Credit: DECaPS2 / DOE / FNAL / DECam / CTIO / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
And if you want more, there’s more. You can view the entire survey, with the ability to zoom in and out, at the Legacy Survey Viewer(Opens in a new window) website.
Our galaxy contains a plethora of stars, but it also contains giant regions of dust and gas. To peer through these obfuscating regions of space, astronomers captured wavelengths of light invisible to the naked eye that are called near-infrared wavelengths. This type of light, which travels in longer waves than visible light, can sneak or pass through space dust, revealing what lies beyond (the powerful James Webb Space Telescope views infrared light, too).
Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.
These new images capture an almost incalculable number of stars. Still, there’s a lot we can’t see out there, but we can imagine. Most stars have at least one planet, and many have diverse solar systems. That adds up to over a trillion exoplanets(Opens in a new window) in our Milky Way galaxy alone.
Some of these planets might rain gems. Some could be ocean worlds. Others could be rocky, Earth-sized planets. There’s untold potential out there in our galaxy, a place teeming with brilliant stars.
Billions of celestial objects captured in new survey of the Milky Way
Astronomers have released a new survey of the Milky Way that includes 3.3 billion celestial objects. (NOIRLab)
Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
ATLANTA — A new survey of the Milky Way galaxy has unveiled 3.3 billion celestial objects.
Our galaxy is brimming with hundreds of billions of stars, dark pillars of dust and gas, and gleaming stellar nurseries where stars are born. Now, astronomers have documented those wonders in unprecedented detail during the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, which captured 21,400 individual exposures over two years.
The survey, which marks the second data release from the program since 2017, is the largest catalog of Milky Way objects to date. The Dark Energy Camera, located on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, captured the data for the survey.
The telescopes there sit at an altitude of about 7,200 feet and can observe the southern sky in great detail across visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light. The two data releases from the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey cover 6.5% of the night sky. Astronomers will be able to use the data release to better map the 3D structure of the galaxy’s dust and stars.
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” said Debra Fischer, division director of astronomical sciences at the National Science Foundation, in a statement.
“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.”
A new image showcasing the celestial objects captured by the survey was released on Wednesday, which includes stars and dust across the Milky Way’s bright galactic disk. The galaxy’s spiral arms also lie in this plane. Together, such bright features make observing the Milky Way’s galactic plane — where most of its disk-shaped mass lies — a difficult task.
Dark streaks of dust seen in the image obscure starlight, while the glow from star-forming regions make it hard to spot the individual brightness of celestial objects.
By using the Dark Energy Camera, astronomers were able to peer through the dust of the galactic plane using near-infrared light and used a data-processing method to mitigate the obscuring effects of the star-forming regions.
The data set was shared in a study published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
“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 lead study author Andrew Saydjari, a doctoral student at Harvard University and researcher at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement.
“Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
×
Related stories
Most recent Science stories
More stories you may be interested in
‘Galactic Panorama’ of Milky Way Details 3.3 Billion Celestial Objects
Astronomers have identified 3.32 billion celestial objects in the Milky Way in unprecedented detail.
The galactic panorama of stars, gas, dust and a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* was captured by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Dark Energy Camera on a 4-meter telescope. It’s housed at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in northern Chile, which sits at an altitude of 7,200 feet, allowing for one of the clearest views of the night sky.
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable,” said
Debra Fischer,
division director of astronomical sciences at the National Science Foundation. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come,” she said.
Gathering the latest batch of data from the project, known as the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, took over two years. It involved around 260 hours of observation with 21,000 exposures, resulting in more than 10 terabytes of data. Along with an earlier data release in 2017, the project has now covered 6.5% of the night sky.
Researchers pointed the telescope at a region of the Milky Way with “an extraordinarily high density of stars,” said
Andrew Saydjari,
a graduate student at Harvard University who worked on the project. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed,” he said.
Images released in the survey show part of the Milky Way’s spiral disk, where most of the stars and dust are located.
The team targeted a region of the Milky Way with ‘an extraordinarily high density of stars,’ a researcher said.
Photo:
DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik Image processing: M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
One small portion of the broader panoramic image is entirely filled with celestial objects, illustrating the challenges researchers faced identifying individual stars due to the sheer number that overlap one another.
“By observing at near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust,” according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which is affiliated with the project.
The survey data was published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement.
Write to Talal Ansari at talal.ansari@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8