Program Results
Making a 3D map of our Galaxy: Dr. Cooper leads the first publication from the DESI Milky Way Survey
Introduction to the event
Image Caption: The red and blue “spikes” in the top image show the positions of 200,000 stars in the DESI Milky Way Survey early data release, as they would appear if we could view them from a point far outside our galaxy. A picture of another galaxy similar to our Milky Way (NGC 891) is used to give a sense of scale. The spikes point towards our real vantage point inside our galaxy, the location of the Sun. The lower panel shows a figure from Cooper et al. (2023). This is an example of the actual data available for one particular star from DESI, a spectrum recording the brightness at thousands of different wavelengths of light. Some features in the spectrum reveal the mix of chemical elements in this star. The colours of the spikes on the top picture correspond to stars that are relatively richer (red) or poorer (blue)in important chemical elements, as measured from their DESI spectrum. The example is for a blue, chemically poor star, possibly far away from the disk of the Galaxy.
In 2022, Dr. Cooper led the first paper from the DESI Milky Way Survey (MWS) collaboration, published in the Astrophysical Journal. The paper describes the design and goals of the MWS project and the results from survey validation operations. DESI MWS will be the largest ever spectroscopic survey of stars in the outer parts of the Milky Way. Dr. Cooper’s work is one of a series of major papers from DESI which will be featured in a special focus edition of the American Astronomical Society Journals. The first data from the DESI survey will be released to the public in June 2023. This will provide data on more than 2 million galaxies and 250,000 stars, which can be used by astronomers all around the world for their own projects. DESI will release more than 20 times this amount of data when the survey is complete in 2025.
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