Billions of celestial objects captured by new survey of the Milky Way | CNN

A new survey of the Milky Way galaxy has unveiled 3.3 billion celestial objects.

Our galaxy is brimming with hundreds of billions of stars, dark pillars of dust and gas, and gleaming stellar nurseries where stars are born. Now, astronomers have documented those wonders in unprecedented detail during the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey, which captured 21,400 individual exposures over two years.

The survey, which marks the second data release from the program since 2017, is the largest catalog of Milky Way objects to date. The Dark Energy Camera, located on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, captured the data for the survey.