The world's largest digital sky survey data have been released. The Dec. 19 release of the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project digitally surveyed and cataloged three-fourths of the night sky and captured information about 3 billion stars, galaxies, and other spatial objects.
Participated by astronomers from the Max Planck Institutes for Astronomy, Heidelberg and Garching's Extraterrestrial Physics institute among others, the vast data of the digital sky survey comprises 3 billion sources including stars and galaxies.
Milky Way Explored In Detail
It must be mentioned that the survey paid extreme attention to the Milky Way plane and disk. This was an area shunned in most surveys because of the complexity involved in mapping the dusty regions.
The project started in May 2010 as the first Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System digital mapping of the sky in visible and near infrared light.
"For the past three years, we put much effort into checking the quality of the data and defining the most useful structure for the catalog," explained Roberto Saglia, who represented the sky survey from Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.
The survey scanned the sky in five filters until 2014 and two years were spent on cataloging the data in such a way the astrophysics community must benefit immensely.
Hans-Walter Rix, director of the Galaxies and Cosmology department of MPIA noted that Pan-STARRS survey is unique because it combines imaging depth and colors in highlighting distant quasars which are the earliest evidence of giant black holes having emerged at the centers of galaxies.
Two-Phase Rollout
The roll out is in two steps. The first phase pertaining to "Static Sky" analyses individual epochs with every object assigned an average value in terms of brightness, position, and colors. Objects also get a stack image in the observed colors.
Galaxies are provided with information on brightness, aperture sizes and viewing conditions. In part two of data, to be released in 2017, information on individual epochs will allow people to access individual images in each observation run.
Benefit For Astronomers
Reflecting the benefits for astronomers, Thomas Henning, director, Planet and Star Formation Department at MPIA said the data offers a better characterization of low-mass star formation in stellar clusters.
"Based on Pan-Starrs, researchers are able to measure distances, motions and special characteristics such as the multiplicity fraction of all nearby stars, brown dwarfs, and of stellar remnants like, for example, white dwarfs," added Henning.
In a nut shell, the gains of the Pan-STARRS project can be summarized as successfully tracking fast-moving objects in the sky with the use of the 6-foot telescope at the top of the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii's Maui. With meticulous details backed by images of the sky in every 30 seconds, expectations are high that the map can offer new insights into dark energy as well.
