Billions of Celestial Objects Revealed in Gargantuan Survey of the Milky Way

noirlab.edu

19 pointsTschayba2 comments

> The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far [...]

> The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas.

So our best data set of the milky way shows 310^9 objects. How do we know then, that the are x100*10^9 objects in total?

If true, is staggering that all this data represents less than 1% of all there is in the milky way alone.

They only sampled 6.5% of the sky. Some of that included dust clouds that block our view of whatever is on the far side of the cloud.