The universe is teeming with galaxies, each brimming with billions of stars. Though all galaxies shine brightly, many are cloaked in dust, while others are so distant that to observers on Earth they appear as little more than faint smudges. By creating comprehensive maps of even the dimmest and most-distant galaxies, astronomers are better able to study the structure of the universe and unravel the mysterious properties of dark matter and dark energy. The largest such map to date has just grown even larger, with the tenth data release from the DOE's Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey.
This is an image centered on a relatively nearby galaxy cluster dubbed Abell 3158; light from these galaxies had a redshift value of 0.059, meaning that it traveled approximately 825 million years on its journey to Earth. The image is a small part of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys — a monumental six-year survey covering nearly half the sky. Credit: DESI Legacy Imaging Survey/KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Image processing: M. Zamani & D.
This effort culminated in the largest two-dimensional map of the sky ever created. With collective observations by the Mosaic-3 camera on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope and the 90Prime camera on the University of Arizona Bok 2.3-meter Telescope, both located at KPNO, as well as the DOE-built Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at CTIO in Chile.
With the addition of southern sky images in the new data release, the Legacy Surveys have been expanded to over 20,000 square degrees, nearly half the sky. In addition, the new release includes images of the sky taken in an additional color filter, able to samplejust redder than what the human eye can see. The additions to the map's footprint and wavelength coverage will in turn make the data useful to a wider demographic of scientists.
It's not only scientists who benefit from the growing archive of astronomical data coming out of the Legacy Surveys. The publicly available data make it possible for astronomy enthusiasts and curious individuals to digitally peruse the universe around us.
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