We know that the sun is just one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, but we don’t know much about most of the stars outside our corner of the cosmos. That’s starting to change, thanks to projects like the DECaPS2 survey. Astronomers working on that initiative have just released a new stellar catalog featuring an incredible 3.32 billion stars. It’s the largest star map ever, and it’s still just a fraction of what’s out there.
The DECaPS2 project uses the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 520-megapixel imager on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope. It was originally built to carry out the Dark Energy Survey, which wrapped up in 2019. The instrument has also been available to astronomers conducting other work, including the DECaPS2 survey. The first data sets were released in 2017, and with the latest update, the star map covers 6.5% of the sky and 130 degrees. That’s 13,000 times the angular area of the full moon when viewed from Earth.
Lead author of the new paper, Andrew Saydjari says that the key to DECaPS2’s success is not a wealth of observation time. Rather, the survey has been able to generate its enormous star map because the team focused on the hard problem of studying the dense starfields in the galactic plane. “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,” Saydjari says.
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.
The DECam was a perfect instrument to take on the challenge of diving into the densest part of the galaxy. It operates in the near-infrared part of the spectrum, allowing it to see past the clouds of dust and gas that obscure observations in the visual spectrum. When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1 observatory, it is possible to create a 3D map of the Milky Way’s disk, providing previously impossible insight into the structure of stars and the interstellar medium.
The datasets collected by the survey are available for download on the project’s site, which is part of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab. There’s also a web-based viewer for the image data, which lets you zoom in on any region scanned by the DECam. And you can keep zooming. It really drives home the staggering level of detail captured by the DECaPS2 project.
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