This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In 2012, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) was commissioned to measure the effect of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the expansion of the cosmos. Since then, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys have obtained optical images of tens of millions of galaxies and quasars, including through NOIRLab's Nicholas U.
Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). In recent news, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team made its 11th data release (DR 11), constituting the largest-ever 2D map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes and asteroids.
It covers roughly 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light, providing a deep view of the extragalactic universe, and is available to the public through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer. "It's part of the fabric of astronomy research now," said David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in a press release. "When you're working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you're looking at." More than 160 scientists contributed to the project, including those associated with the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS).
The data were gathered by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope and UA Bok 2.3-meter Telescope at the NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, and were complemented by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Arjun Dey, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and an astronomer at NSF NOIRLab, said: Explorations of our universe always start with images of the night sky.
The DESI Imaging Legacy Surveys are just one step in this venerable human tradition. For our team, these data are fundamental to the investigation of the expansion history of the universe and the formation of our galaxy. But the skies belong to everyone, and this survey gives everyone the chance to marvel at their wonders.
The map builds on earlier versions of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, which completed their originally planned five-year mission earlier this year, mapping more than 47 million galaxies and quasars in the local universe out to 11 billion light-years. By providing the location and brightness of galaxies and stars, the 2D map enables DESI to select objects and measure their light at different wavelengths to determine their distances. This will fulfill DESI's purpose of creating the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe, which scientists will use to map and study how galaxies have clustered across different ages of the universe.
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