The largest digital survey of the visible Universe, mapping billions of stars and galaxies, has been publicly released.
Pan-STARRS sky survey. Image credit: Pan-STARRS1 Science Consortium.
Astronomers with the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project used a 1.8-m telescope at the summit of Haleakalā, on Maui, Hawaii, to repeatedly image three quarters of the visible sky over four years.
The data the researchers have captured is made up of three billion separate sources, including stars, galaxies, and other space objects.
This collection of information contains two petabytes of data – equivalent to one billion selfies or one hundred times the total content of Wikipedia.
“We’ve worked on this project for more than five years and have found the most luminous distant explosions in the Universe and also nearby asteroids in our Solar System,” said Queen’s University Belfast Professor Stephen Smartt, who is Chair of the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) Science Council.
“It was a fantastic team effort and now we hope the whole science community will benefit from this public release of our data.”
“The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogues containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies,” said Dr. Ken Chambers, Director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories, at the University of Hawaii.
“Pan-STARRS has already 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 roll-out of the Pan-STARRS survey data is being done in two steps.
The first data release is the ‘Static Sky’ which provides an average value for the position, brightness and color for objects captured in the sky at individual moments in time.
In 2017, a second set of data will be released including catalogues and images from each of the individual snapshots that Pan-STARRS took of a given region of sky.
