New Milky Way survey reveals tapestry of billions of celestial objects

New Milky Way survey reveals tapestry of billions of celestial objects

Astronomers have released a massive survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains 3.32 billion celestial objects, the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a NOIRLab program. (Image Credit: DECaPS2/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/E. Slawik  | M. Zamani (NSF's NOIRLab) & D. de Martin (NSF's NOIRLab)