DESI releases vast sky map with 4 billion celestial objects
The latest DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys release covers about 75 per cent of the sky and is available through a free online viewer.
Astronomers have released what project materials describe as the largest map of the universe, a 5.6 trillion-pixel imaging survey containing approximately 4 billion celestial objects.
The latest DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys map covers about 75 per cent of the sky, capturing visible-light and near-infrared data. The objects recorded include stars, galaxies, black holes and asteroids.
The survey’s five years of data collection followed 13 years of groundwork involving more than 160 scientists. A free online viewer allows the public to explore the imaging data, which researchers say will support work on dark energy, cosmic history and the expansion of the universe.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, has also mapped the distances of 47 million galaxies and quasars, reconstructing about 11 billion years of cosmic history. Data from DESI’s first three years, combined with other observations, has indicated that dark energy may be weakening over time, but that possibility is not an established conclusion.
A full analysis of DESI’s five years of data is scheduled for release in 2027. The survey will also provide a reference for projects including NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, while researchers plan to use artificial intelligence to help analyse the petabyte-scale dataset, according to WIRED.
