Pan-STARRS Releases ‘Largest Digital Sky Survey Of The Universe’ Showing 3 Billion Stars, Galaxies

An international team of astronomers associated with the Pan-STARRS project has released the world's largest digital survey of the visible universe. The survey reportedly includes observations of billions of stars and galaxies and comprises of two petabytes of computer data, which are comparable to a billion selfies.

According to an India Today report, the astronomers continuously scanned and imaged three-fourths of the visible sky for more than four years with a 1.8 meter telescope located at Hawaii's Haleakala Observatories in Maui. The scientists scanned 3 billion objects in the Milky Way, and the scans were conducted 12 times using five different filters. The celestial objects that were catalogued include stars, galaxies and asteroids among others. The survey also identified probable exoplanets and asteroids apart from gathering data about billions of stars. The Pan-STARRS images were analyzed by algorithms for evidence of moving objects. 

"Pan-STARRS has already made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars," said Ken Chambers, director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories at the University of Hawaii, as revealed by Queen's University Belfast. "It has mapped the dust in three dimensions in the Milky Way and found new streams of stars, and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early Universe," he added.

It may be already tough to grasp the immensity of two petabytes of data; however, this is not the extent of the astronomers' observations. The research team is going to release even more detailed images and data in 2017.

Pan-STARRS, which is short for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, is a mission whose primary objective is to detect near-Earth objects that threaten impact events, as well as create a database of all objects visible from Hawaii, which is basically three-fourths of the entire sky. The project is funded largely by the United States Air Force.