Astronomers have finally revealed the world's largest digital survey of the universe, mapping out billions of stars and galaxies, thanks to the Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System) observatory.
The map was created using data from the Pan-STARRS telescope, which is located on the summit of the Haleakala volcano in Maui, Hawaii. The telescope's mission is to capture massive images of the sky every 30 seconds for four years.
In May 2010, the Pan-STARRS observatory embarked on a digital survey of the sky and the visible universe using near infrared light.
This is the first digital sky survey that observed the night skies repeatedly with the aims of searching for moving near-Earth objects such as asteroids, which can potentially strike the planet.
According to the director of Pan-STARRS Observatories, Ken Chambers from the University of Hawaii, these surveys allow anyone to access millions of images and to use databases and catalogs that contain precise measurements of billions of stars and galaxies.
Among the discoveries of Pan-STARRS are near-Earth objects and Kuiper Belt objects including dwarf planets and exoplanets. The surveys also provided a three-dimensional view of cosmic dust in galaxies including supernovae and quasars from the early universe.
In 2015, the observatory launched an interactive map of the Milky Way galaxy revealing the complex structures of our home galaxy never seen before.
This year, this survey reveals the most detailed map of our universe ever created, in two phases.
The first one involves a "Static Sky" that reveals objects captured in our skies during different moments in time, along with their position, level of brightness and color. In 2017, the second data set will be released along with imagery and catalogs from each of the photos that Pan-STARRS has taken in a certain region of the sky.
"This super rapid and fast repetitive survey enabled us to pinpoint many rare sky events such as when a supermassive black hole destroys a passing star. If not, it would have been impossible to capture," Andy Lawrence from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh said.
With this new intensive star map of the universe, astronomers will be able to study the elusive dark matter and dark energy that are believed to hold everything in place in the known universe and unravel more mysteries of the cosmos.