You know what they say, “size matters”! And boy, oh boy, does the Milky Way galaxy have the size! It’s so big, you could fit a zillion Earths inside and still have room for a game of cosmic Marco Polo. It’s so humongous, if you were to travel at the speed of light, it would take you a whopping 100,000 years to cross it! It’s so vast, you could line up a trillion of our puny little solar systems and they still wouldn’t reach the edges.
In short, the Milky Way galaxy is so big, it makes Mount Everest look like an anthill in comparison. But don’t worry, you don’t have to be a supernova to appreciate its grandeur, just look up at the night sky and marvel at the endless expanse.
3.32 billion cosmic objects of the Milky Way revealed by a new survey
Scientists and astronomers have recently unveiled an awe-inspiring survey of the Milky Way galaxy, which is nothing short of a monumental achievement. This new survey is an astronomical feat that is sure to leave stargazers and scientists alike in amazement. Phys.org reveals that the dataset contains an astonishing 3.32 billion celestial objects. This makes it arguably the most extensive catalog of its kind ever compiled.
3.3 billion Milky Way objects revealed by colossal astronomical survey https://t.co/dpEEWNWkW7 pic.twitter.com/qUAYTclFAZ
— SPACE.com (@SPACEdotcom) January 18, 2023
We’re talking about the DECaPS2 survey, which needed two years to complete. It put together over 10 terabytes of data from more than 21,000 individual exposures.
The survey was made possible by the use of the Dark Energy Camera, which was built by the US Department of Energy in Chila, at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. This state-of-the-art camera was used to capture the data for this unprecedented survey, providing us with an unprecedented glimpse into the vast expanse of the Milky Way.
Astronomers generally estimate that our galaxy contains somewhere between 100 billion and 200 billion stars, which can only mean that they still have a lot of homework to do.
