DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys unveils largest 2D universe map

Astronomers have unveiled the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever created, produced by the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team. The massive dataset consists of 5.6 trillion pixels and captures nearly 4 billion celestial objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes, and asteroids.

The map covers approximately 75% of the visible sky using visible and near-infrared light. This coverage allows researchers to peer through interstellar dust that would otherwise obscure distant cosmic phenomena. The project is the culmination of 13 years of observations, integrating over 263,000 individual telescope exposures collected over 2,285 nights.

Data was gathered from major ground-based surveys in Chile and Arizona, supplemented by infrared observations from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The computational process involved specialized software and roughly eight weeks of processing on the Perlmutter supercomputer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

This 2D atlas serves as a foundational tool for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to facilitate its larger mission of creating a three-dimensional map of the universe. Scientists intend to use the data to study dark matter, dark energy, and the expansion history of the cosmos.