The DESI Legacy Imaging Survey Releases the Largest 2-D Map of the Universe

The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys released its eleventh data release (DR 11), the largest-ever 2D map of the Universe. The map contains nearly four billion celestial objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes, and asteroids, and covers 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light. The survey was conducted using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope, and the UA Bok 2.3-meter Telescope at the NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory, complemented by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The data was gathered by more than 160 scientists, including those from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS), and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS). The map provides a deep view of the extragalactic Universe and is available to the public through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer.

The map is part of the fabric of astronomy research and enables DESI to select objects and measure their light in different wavelengths to determine their distances. This will help scientists constrain the effects of Dark Energy on cosmic evolution. The map builds on earlier versions of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, which completed its originally planned five-year mission earlier this year, mapping more than 47 galaxies and quasars in the local Universe out to 11 billion light-years. The data provides location and brightness information for galaxies and stars, which is essential for DESI's purpose of creating the largest high-resolution 3D map of the Universe.

The map will benefit astronomers and citizen scientists studying gravitational lenses, transient events like supernovae, fast radio bursts (FRBs), gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), and other rare phenomena. It will also help scientists investigate Dark Matter and train machine learning and AI tools to analyze petabytes of raw astronomical data. The map will also help scientists train AI tools to analyze data from next-generation observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. DESI expects to publish improved results from its first five years of operations in 2027 and continue observations into 2028. The full catalog is available as a searchable database via the Astro Data Lab at the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC).

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