Astronomers in the US have released a stunning new map of our galaxy and its cosmic neighbourhood – complete with more than 800 million stars, galaxies and intergalactic objects.
The map has been compiled from four years of data captured by the Pan-STARRS observatory in Maui, Hawaii.
It contains more than 1.6 million gigabytes of data, making it the largest volume of astronomical information ever released.
The University of Hawai’i said it is equivalent to two billion selfies or 30,000 times the total text content of Wikipedia.
The bright, red smear running down the middle of the image is our Milky Way Galaxy. The brightest part at the bottom of the sphere is the centre of the galaxy.
There are more than 800 million celestial objects within the image – although most of what is visible is contained within the Milky Way.
Oh hello, what’s this, DR2?!?! YES IT IS! You can have all our 3pi single epoch data now! ðŸ˜ðŸ˜https://t.co/LTgW5cIEfc thanks @MAST_News for taking care of our data and making it available to the community â¤ï¸ pic.twitter.com/k9kfB9fZs6
— Pan-STARRS1 Science (@PanSTARRS1) January 28, 2019
Heather Flewelling, researcher and key designer at the university’s Institute for Astronomy (IFA) said the release includes a “vast quantity of astronomical data, with many great discoveries already unveiled.”
The Pan-STARRS observatory on the summit of HaleakalÄ, a volcano on the island of Maui, consists of a 1.8m telescope equipped with a 1.4bn pixel digital camera.
The Pan-STARRS observatory on HaleakalÄ, Maui
It has been surveying the night sky over Hawaii – in visible and near-infrared light – since May 2010.
One of its goals was to identify moving objects in our galactic neighbourhood, including asteroids that could potentially threaten Earth.
Over four years, it scanned the night sky 12 times with five different light filters.
"Universe in a box"
The IFA said this second release from the project will allow space enthusiasts to “search the full survey for high-energy explosive events in the cosmos, discover moving objects in our own solar system, and explore the time domain of the universe.”
"We put the universe in a box and everyone can take a peek," said database engineer Conrad Holmberg.
The Pan-STARRS observatory on HaleakalÄ, Maui
Pan-STARRS director, Dr Ken Chambers, said the project has already “made many discoveries, from Ê»Oumuamua’ passing through our solar system to lonely planets between the stars.”
“It has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe.
“We hope people will discover all kinds of things we missed in this incredibly large and rich dataset.”
The data is housed in the MAST archive, which hosts all of NASA’s optical observations since the early 1970s.
You can access the data here.
