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150 Gigapixel Sky Image Contains 1 Billion Stars

Posted by Unknown on from the scientists-declare-universe-contains-lots-of-stuff dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have used two big telescopes to create an infrared survey of the Milky Way that is the largest of its kind: the resulting image has an incredible 150,000 megapixels containing over a billion stars. Something that large is difficult to use, so they also made a pan-and-zoom version online which should keep you occupied for quite some time. These data will be used to better understand star formation in our Milky Way, and how far more distant galaxies and quasars behave." The interactive image is powered by IIPImage which happens to be Free Software and is cool in its own right (right click the image to get help — it has a full set of keybindings for navigation).

31 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Oh my god by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's full of stars!

    1. Re:Oh my god by Joce640k · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Question is ... is it an American 'billion' or the same 'billion' as the rest of the world?

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    2. Re:Oh my god by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Perhaps a silly question... Why do a lot of the stars when you zoom in you get a black dot in the middle...
      I mean if they were a planet. 1. so many of them shouldn't be almost directly in the middle. 2. Those planets would be HUGE (or a rogue planet eclipsing the star (still why then are all of them in the center) So that seems unlikely.

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    3. Re:Oh my god by jcgam69 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The sensor is supersaturated due to the star's brightness.

    4. Re:Oh my god by boristhespider · · Score: 3, Informative

      the word "billion" in british english means 10^12 to a lot of people too - hence the comment i replied to. before i went into science it meant 10^12 to me, as well, but spend long enough in science and you begin to see just how few people are aware of that - and it seems to get fewer each year.

    5. Re:Oh my god by uigrad_2000 · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's written in English, so it is most likely using the short-scale (American system, as you call it). The U.S. has always used the short scale system, and the U.K. (and almost all other English speaking countries) have used it since 1974.

      The long system is hardly used any place outside of Europe. So, this is one of the strange cases where the U.S. and the U.K. use the same system, and it's the system used by the majority of the world. In this case, it is France/Italy/Germany/Spain/Portugal/Netherlends that insist on using their own system.

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    6. Re:Oh my god by Baloroth · · Score: 4, Informative

      If by "American" billion you mean "English" billion, than yes. Since Slashdot is an entirely English speaking site, it is most appropriate to use the English word for 10^9... which is billion.

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      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    7. Re:Oh my god by UnknowingFool · · Score: 3, Insightful
      [Carl Sagan voice]
      Milliards and milliards of stars.

      Doesn't have quite the same ring.

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    8. Re:Oh my god by X0563511 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It would be nice if people would stop being stupid and we could actually say 10^12 in a news article and not get slack-jawed stares. That would solve a lot of this silly ambiguity.

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    9. Re:Oh my god by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      the word "billion" in british english means 10^12 to a lot of people too - hence the comment i replied to. before i went into science it meant 10^12 to me, as well, but spend long enough in science and you begin to see just how few people are aware of that - and it seems to get fewer each year.

      Or a little thinking (not too much) can realize that a million-million makes no sense in this context.

      1-million-million is 1,000,000,000,000 (10^12).

      This image is 150,000-million, or 150,000,000,000.

      If 1 billion referred to was defined as million-million, it's easy to see that there would be more stars than pixels in the image by over 6 stars to 1 pixel.

      OTOH, using it as meaning 10^9, it means there's 1 star for ever 150 pixels, which seems to make MUCH more sense.

    10. Re:Oh my god by jc42 · · Score: 2

      ... Then we can slowly push them towards 10^{12}, which lets us type 10^121x without ambiguity. A few years down the road we could all be happily writing and reading LaTeX in news articles and do our bit against the dumbing-down of the internet...

      Well, lotsa luck with that plan. I'd guess that, for the mass media, it'll always be understood that any number with more than 3 digits (or any non-digit chars) will baffle 90% of their readers. So the editors with rewrite them in words that aren't well defined, but don't scare the huge majority of their readers.

      Of course, this is /., so we can probably reduce that 90% to 80%. ;-)

      (And WTF does "quintillion" mean, anyway? What standards body defines such terms? No, dictionaries aren't standards bodies, and they don't all agree on such terms above "million". They don't even agree on which terms are defined, much less what they mean. ;-)

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    11. Re:Oh my god by jc42 · · Score: 2

      The local TV quite often mistranslates "billion" when they talk about the US national debt. :) ... Should fire those guys and hire someone who actually knows English, anyway.

      Except that English-language dictionaries don't agree on the meanings of any number words above "million". And there is no official standards body for the English language. Some other languages have such a body, notably French, but not English. And hiring people who pick one of a list of inconsistent definitions and declare it their "standard" is the process that led us to the morass that is the English-language "common speech".

      As others have pointed out, scientific/engineering/LaTeX notation is the only actual working solution. But most of the media's editors know that this will scare most of their readers, so they edit it into words that don't have precise meanings.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    12. Re:Oh my god by boristhespider · · Score: 2

      Yeah but then you get people playing games like using megaseconds to measure a year. (A year is very approximately 30*pi megaseconds, if you don't mind shitty approximations.)

  2. That's Big! by Hatta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Assuming 8 bits per pixel, a 150,000,000,000 pixel image would be 419GB.

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    1. Re:That's Big! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Assuming 8 bits per pixel, a 150,000,000,000 pixel image would be 419GB.

      Your new computer math is intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

    2. Re:That's Big! by MikeyC01 · · Score: 2

      What's an extra 16 bits per pixel between friends?

    3. Re:That's Big! by SureshotM6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The source is a 91.6GB TIFF file. The filename on the server is in some of the CGI requests.

      -> curl -I http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/v5.tif
      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:42:27 GMT
      Server: Apache/2.2.21 (Debian)
      Last-Modified: Sat, 24 Mar 2012 16:13:29 GMT
      ETag: "f61e88-16e808414a-4bbff6bf3ed80"
      Accept-Ranges: bytes
      Content-Type: image/tiff
      Content-Length: 98382135626
      Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
      Connection: Keep-Alive

    4. Re:That's Big! by mikael · · Score: 4, Informative

      Raw CCD sensor data is usually more than 8 bits per channel (or colour filter). 16 bits per pixel is used for professional cameras, but those sensors use Bayer format for red, green and blue. Telescopes just place different colour filters over the entire sensor and correct for different levels of sensitivity.

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    5. Re:That's Big! by digitalaudiorock · · Score: 4, Funny

      Who else is somehow expecting to get that thing in a email from one of your less tech-savvy relatives...

  3. 3D version? by cavok · · Score: 3, Funny

    Why this is not in 3D yet?!?

    1. Re:3D version? by JTsyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Would you even be able to tell the difference between things lightyears away without having your two points of view much further apart that 2 sides of Earth orbit?

    2. Re:3D version? by Baloroth · · Score: 2

      Walk outside at night. Tada! the entire universe in 3D (ok, a little less than half of it, but still).

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
  4. Daytime? by Anne_Nonymous · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now if we could just get a 150,000 megapixel image of the daytime sky, we wouldn't have to go outside at all.

  5. 1 in 150 pixels is a star! by crow · · Score: 2

    What I find most surprising is that they report over a billion stars with an image containing 150 billion pixels. That's a much higher density that I would have expected.

    I guess that my intuition in such things isn't very good, which, not being an astronomer, isn't surprising.

    1. Re:1 in 150 pixels is a star! by boristhespider · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you read up on Olber's paradox you'll find it's even actually a significantly lower density than you might expect...

  6. Re:Where can I download this? by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Was just looking at that and thinking...
    How much would it cost to get a photo quality print made that is 9 feet tall and long enough to wrap around my entire den at my house? That would be the best ever wallpaper.

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  7. And that's only this galaxy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are likely as many galaxies in the observable universe as there are stars in this galaxy.

  8. Re:Doughnut Stars by oodaloop · · Score: 2, Funny

    A large massive object, like your mom, placed in front of the star can act like a gravitational lens.

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  9. Black dot in the center of stars? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anyone know why almost all stars (it can be seen easier in big ones) have a black dot in the middle?

  10. Re:Doughnut Stars by GodfatherofSoul · · Score: 4, Informative

    The sensor is supersaturated due to the star's brightness.

    [If this works, I'm going to become a karma whoring god]

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  11. A sense of scale by adenied · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A billion stars seems like a lot but general consensus is that the Milky Way alone has 300 +/- 100 billion stars. So at best this is like 0.5% of the galaxy. I just read about the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey looking at 300,000 galaxies and planning on hitting 1,000,000 eventually. The number of stars out there is truly mind blowing for us puny humans. It's really impressive if you stop to think about it.