An international research team has compiled and released what it claims is the most comprehensive catalog of galaxies in the night sky. The project, called Regalade, reportedly includes precise data on the distance and size of nearly 80 million galaxies.
For this work, the team merged 14 widely used datasets, sky surveys, and enhanced them using measurement data from the Gaia space telescope.
Covering the entire night sky over a distance of over six billion light-years, which corresponds to about 10% of the volume of the entire observable universe, the catalog is of immense value for research.
The catalog is useful primarily for pinpointing the origin of a transient phenomenon in the sky. This could be a supernova or collisions of black holes or neutron stars, the team says.
The new Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon find seven million indications of such events every night. Regalade is intended to help quickly identify the galaxy from which a signal originates. Only then can the signals be quickly classified and determined which ones require further analysis.
This will also "open the door to the discovery of completely new types of celestial phenomena," says co-author Nadejda Blagorodnova.
Previous catalogs only fully covered comparatively nearby galaxies, leaving large gaps from a distance of 300 million light-years onwards, the team reports.
The work now presented combines expertise from time-domain astronomy, binary star analysis, work with star catalogs, and multiple message astronomy.
Those who want to get a glimpse of the catalog can use an interactive online viewer . The work is presented in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
10.1051 / 0004-6361 / 202556896
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
