The Largest Digital Survey Of The Visible Universe Is Now Publicly Available
Over the past four years, astronomers
associated with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System
(Pan-STARRS) project at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa have repeatedly
scanned three-quarters of the sky in visible and infrared light. Now, these
images, which show up to 3 billion stars, galaxies and other celestial objects,
are freely available for download — if you have 2 petabytes of spare space,
that is.
“The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys allow
anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs
containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies,” Ken
Chambers, director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories, said in a statement released Monday.
“Pan-STARRS has made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt
Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped
the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and
it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early
universe.”
The images were captured using the 1.8-meter
telescope on the summit of Haleakalā, on Maui, Hawaii. In addition to expanding
the census of almost all objects in our neighborhood to distances of roughly
300 light-years, the images would also help scientists understand the formation
of low-mass stars in stellar clusters.
“Achieving the high quality of
the Pan-STARRS1 measurements and maintaining it over such an enormous
quantity of data was a unique computational challenge and the results are a
tribute to the dedicated efforts of our small team of scientists at
the UH IfA [University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy] and
our collaborators who worked to process and calibrate the extraordinary volume
of raw image data,” Eugene Magnier, lead of the Pan-STARRS image
processing team, said in the statement.
The data from the survey, which is available
for download here, is being released in
two separate tranches. The first portion, released Monday, provides the average
value for the position, brightness and color for the objects imaged, while the
second dataset, to be released next year, will include catalogs and images from
each of the snapshots that Pan-STARRS took of a given region of sky.
Video
Link | https://youtu.be/xxmsi8r1yTg
Link | http://www.ibtimes.com/largest-digital-survey-visible-universe-now-publicly-available-2463612
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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