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Sweeping New Milky Way Portrait Captures More Than 3 Billion Stars - CNET
Jan 22, 2023 50 secs
NOIRLab called it"arguably the largest such catalog compiled to date" in a statement on Wednesday.

Enlarge Image This wide strip of the Milky Way contains billions of celestial objects as part of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey.

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.

See all photos"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.

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