Astronomers have released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe, featuring nearly 4 billion stars, galaxies, and other celestial objects.
Created by the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team, the massive map contains 5.6 trillion pixels. The data is available to astronomers, citizen scientists, and the general public through the online Legacy Survey Sky Viewer .
The detailed view of the sky will allow researchers to search for rare phenomena such as gravitational lenses and study fleeting events, including supernovae.
It could also help scientists investigate two of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is the invisible substance believed to account for most of the mass in the universe, while dark energy is thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.
The latest map builds on earlier data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, which has already become an important resource for astronomical research. More than 1,800 scientific papers have used or referenced Legacy Surveys data.
David Schlegel, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and a scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said the data has become an integral part of astronomy research. Astronomers now often begin studying a celestial object by checking it in the Legacy Imaging Viewer.
The map provides scientists with an exceptionally detailed view of billions of objects across the universe and could help improve understanding of its large-scale structure and some of its biggest unanswered questions.
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