80 million galaxies: Gigantic astronomical catalog viewable online
A research team has merged incomplete astronomical catalogs and collected the positions of 80 million galaxies in a new database.
(Image: REGALADE)
An international research group has compiled and made publicly available what it claims is the most comprehensive catalog of galaxies in the night sky. The project, named REGALADE, reportedly includes precise data on the distance and size of almost 80 million galaxies. For this work, the team merged 14 widely used datasets and sky surveys and refined them using measurement data from the Gaia space telescope. The entire night sky up to a distance of more than six billion light-years is covered, which is about 10 percent of the volume of the observable universe as a whole. The catalog is of immense value for research.
A "Door to Discoveries"
The catalog is mainly helpful for identifying the origin of a transient phenomenon in the sky. This could be supernovae or collisions of black holes or neutron stars, the team explains. The brand-new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in particular, will soon find seven million clues every night to such events; REGALADE is intended to help quickly identify the galaxy from which a signal originates. Only then can the signals be rapidly classified and it can be determined which of them require further analysis. This will also "open the door to the discovery of completely new types of celestial phenomena," is convinced co-author Nadejda Blagorodnova.
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Previously available catalogs only covered comparatively nearby galaxies completely, with large gaps existing from a distance of 300 million light-years onwards, the team further explains. The work now presented brings together expertise from time-domain astronomy, the analysis of binary stars, work with star catalogs, and multi-messenger astronomy. The result is an important foundation for the scientific use of the data volumes that new observatories in space and on Earth are now and will soon be providing. Those who want to get an impression of the catalog can use an interactive view on the internet. The work is presented in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The Gaia space telescope, fundamental to this work, was launched at the end of 2013 and was considered perhaps the most important telescope in space shortly after commencing scientific operations six months later. With a gigapixel camera, it continuously scanned the night sky for more than ten years. Because it moved with the Earth around the sun, the precise measurement data, thanks to so-called parallax measurement, enabled increasingly accurate determination of the position of billions of stars and also galaxies. The instrument was intended to lay the foundation for a wide variety of further research, and the space telescope has already impressively achieved exactly that. A year ago, it had to be deactivated.
(mho)
