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After 1405 nights of observation over 6 years, astronomers from three observatories produced an image of the night sky containing 10 trillion pixels of data and representing more than a billion galaxies. Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy has the details.
This is the result of DESI Legacy Imagining Surveys, sky maps carried out by the three observatories (the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey, in combination with the infrared WISE in orbit. observatory). They mapped the northern sky in seven colors, covering a third of the entire sky – 14,000 square degrees, or the equivalent area of 70,000 full moons on the sky.
The ultimate goal is to better understand dark energy, the mysterious substance that accelerates the expansion of the Universe, by looking at the distribution of galaxies throughout the Universe. They will do this by selecting tens of millions of the billion galaxies in the data and obtaining follow-up observations with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which will take the spectra of these galaxies and find their distances.
Since we will know their positions in the sky and their distances, this will make a 3D map of the Universe bigger than ever.
The photo included at the top of the article is just a tiny piece of the full picture – you can pan and zoom the whole thing in this viewer. Make sure to zoom out increments from the default view in order to fully appreciate how absurdly this image (and the universe) is.
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